In Washington, D.C., $3 million in robotics research, application and education funding for agricultural systems was made available under the National Robotics Initiative by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The NRI program goal is to speed the development and use of robots that work alongside or cooperatively with people in agriculture.
The NRI is a federal research partnership including NIFA, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. This funding opportunity is for research into the scalability and variety of collaborative human-robot interactions, known as co-robots, and can include collaborative robots/humans teams, robots that can be easily customized or infrastructure that lowers co-robot barriers to entry.
NIFA will consider projects comprising one or more investigators, budgets of approximately $150,000 to $300,000 per year in total costs and durations of two to five years.