Apply Physical AI to the hard problems.
We work with defense, government, and industry to take Physical AI from prototype toward fielded capability: applied research, advanced development, and working systems, built by the people who teach and research it here. Provable, on-device, and tested where it has to work.
From a question to a working system.
The applied-engineering spine: research through prototype to evaluation.
Targeted R&D
Focused research against your problem in perception, autonomy, and edge AI.
Lab to readiness
Moving a capability up the technology-readiness ladder, toward something deployable.
Working systems
Hardware and software you can put in front of operators and test in real conditions.
Evaluation & integration
Independent evaluation, integration support, and technical advisory.
What we bring.
Grounded in the Institute's research areas and labs.
Eyes that hold up
Multimodal perception (depth, detection, fusion) that works in degraded conditions and on the device.
Coordinated, multi-domain
Air, land, and sea autonomy that coordinates over lossy links and degrades gracefully.
Inference under SWaP
Real-time models inside the power, weight, and thermal limits of the platform, with no cloud in the loop.
Test & verify
Reproducible, deterministic simulation for evaluation, replay, and certification.
Drones that do the job
Unmanned systems for logistics, search and rescue, and surveillance, from the Hiner Lab.
Grounded & verifiable
Physically grounded, energy-aware control with behavior you can check, from the Charlot Lab.
Ways to work with us.
However the funding is structured, the work is the same: scope it, build it, test it.
Federal programs
SBIR/STTR, BAAs, and sponsored-research agreements.
Contract research
Scoped research and prototyping engagements, sponsor-funded.
Defense and commercial
Work that serves a mission and a market in parallel.
People with a federal R&D track record.
The work is led by investigators whose own research has been awarded federal SBIR/STTR funding across the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy, with experience spanning defense and the energy sector.