The National Science Foundation gave the Center for Connected Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at FAU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science and Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering a $1 million grant to create the nation’s first platform connecting robots through radio waves.

The team of researchers includes Dimitris Pados, George Sklivanitis, Xiangnan Zhong, and Jason Hallstrom. 

Connecting the robots through their own modem, which is used to connect devices to the internet, will allow them to train together as a team to execute tasks.

“Just like humans, autonomous robots need to communicate with one another to learn together and to accomplish a team task such as search and rescue,” Dimitris Pados, director of the Center for Connected Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence said for FAU News Desk.

The robots will be able to communicate at high speeds of gigabits per second, which are commonly used to measure data transfer speeds between hardware devices, and all five of them will sense what the others are seeing by directing beams towards each other, allowing them to see through objects.

The robots will be trained using data sets curated under a project funded by the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, aimed at evaluating the quality of data.

The platform offers unique research opportunities in the world of robotics, multi-agent artificial intelligence, and wireless networking. It will also be available through remote access to researchers from other schools in the U.S. for experimentations.

Rayna Cohen is a staff writer for the University Press. For information regarding this or other stories, email [email protected].