NSF and USDA-NIFA National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes (NSF 23-610) for Agriculture, Climate, and Foundational AI

NSF and USDA-NIFA National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes (NSF 23-610) for Agriculture, Climate, and Foundational AI is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and other federal and industry partners. The National AI Research Institutes program is NSF's flagship AI investment, funding large multi-institution centers at roughly $20 million each over five years.

The ARM Institute's 27-01 Core-Funded Technology Project Call is the current cycle of the institute's recurring robotics funding programme, and this round is framed explicitly around Robotics and Physical AI Defense Manufacturing Solutions. ARM is a Manufacturing USA institute funded by the Office of the Secretary of Defense with a consortium of more than 450 industry, academic and government members, and its project calls exist to push robotics, autonomy and AI into U.S. manufacturing rather than to fund basic research. The 27-01 call targets defense manufacturing needs including high-mix castings and forgings, naval vessels, unmanned systems, munitions, and rapid production expansion, with a strong preference for dual-use technology that also benefits the broader U.S. manufacturing base. The preceding 26-01 call, a useful guide to scale and topic style, made roughly USD 2,000,000 available with a USD 500,000 per-project cap and named topic areas of Multi-Modal Inputs for AI Robotics in Manufacturing, Rapid Re-Tasking and Robot Agility, Multi-Robot and Multi-Human Collaboration and Supervised Autonomy, Adaptive Real-Time Path Planning and Control, and Mobile Robotics. The single most important eligibility constraint is membership: only ARM Institute members may submit, so non-members intending to apply need to start the membership process well ahead of the deadlines. The process is two-stage - concept papers are due 16 September 2026 and final submissions by 2 December 2026 at 5:00 PM ET, with a target project start on or before 1 February 2027 and project end by 31 January 2028, which implies a tightly scoped twelve-month execution plan rather than a multi-year research programme.