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The Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program, established in 1985, is the Navy's principal early-career research award and one of the largest such programmes in the US federal government, typically providing 750,000 US dollars over three years to faculty in their first or second tenure-track appointment.
Machine learning, autonomous operations and dexterous robotics are consistently represented among funded topics: the FY2026 cohort of 23 awardees, drawn from 22 institutions in 11 states and sharing roughly 17,000,000 US dollars, included work on machine learning, autonomous operations, dexterous robotics, advanced sensors and decision superiority alongside more traditional naval science areas such as ocean acoustics and hypersonics.
The FY2027 competition is open under announcement N0001426SF004, with white papers due 30 October 2026.
What distinguishes ONR's programme from its Air Force and Army counterparts is both the award size and the tight coupling to programme officer interests: proposals are evaluated against the research areas described by ONR's Science and Technology Departments, and the expected practice is that a prospective applicant contacts the relevant programme officer before writing.
For AI and robotics researchers specifically, ONR's interests skew toward autonomy in contested and communications-denied maritime environments, human-machine teaming under uncertainty, multi-agent coordination, and machine learning on sparse, noisy or adversarially corrupted sensor data, which is a meaningfully different framing from the data-rich settings that dominate academic machine learning.
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Or search similar grants →According to the current listing, eligibility includes: Eligibility is narrower than the Air Force programme and applicants should check it carefully before investing effort. Awards are made only to US institutions of higher education that award degrees in science, engineering or mathematics, although US non-profit organisations operating primarily for scientific and educational services may also submit. The principal investigator must be a US citizen, national or permanent resident on the date proposals are due, must hold a first or second full-time tenure-track or tenure-track-equivalent faculty position at that institution, and must have received a Ph.D. or equivalent degree on or after 1 January 2019 for the FY2027 cycle. The tenure-track requirement excludes research faculty, teaching faculty and industrial researchers, which is the most common source of ineligibility among otherwise strong AI applicants. The process begins with a white paper, due 30 October 2026 for FY2027, and ONR provides feedback before full proposals are invited; the white paper stage is where most of the winnowing happens given roughly 330 applicants for about 23 awards. Proposals must address research areas of interest to a specific ONR programme officer as described in the ONR Science and Technology Department pages, and unsolicited topics with no programme officer champion are not competitive regardless of technical merit. Applicants should identify and contact the relevant programme officer well before the white paper deadline, and should frame AI and autonomy work against concrete naval operating conditions rather than generic benchmarks. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.
The current listing shows typical ONR Young Investigator Program awards are 750,000 US dollars over a 36-month period of performance, with applicants permitted to request up to 250,000 US dollars for each 12-month interval, so amount_min and amount_max are both recorded as 750,000 US dollars. This makes ONR's YIP the most generous of the three service early-career programmes by a wide margin, roughly 1.7 times the Air Force equivalent, and the difference is meaningful: 250,000 US dollars per year supports two graduate students plus meaningful compute or hardware, which is the difference between a paper-generating project and one that can actually build and field an autonomous system. The FY2026 cohort illustrates the scale of the competition, with approximately 17,000,000 US dollars shared among 23 faculty selected from nearly 330 applicants, an acceptance rate of about 7 per cent. Budgets should be built around a sustained three-year research line rather than a sequence of short experiments, and applicants working on robotics or autonomy should be explicit about hardware and test-time costs, because ONR programme officers are experienced at spotting proposals whose experimental plan is unaffordable within the requested budget. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.
Applications for Office of Naval Research (ONR) Fiscal Year 2027 Young Investigator Program for Early-Career Machine Learning, Autonomy and Robotics Faculty are due October 30, 2026. Build your timeline backwards from this date to cover registrations, approvals, and final submission checks.
Office of Naval Research (ONR) Fiscal Year 2027 Young Investigator Program for Early-Career Machine Learning, Autonomy and Robotics Faculty is funded by U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), Department of the Navy. Verify program details on the funder's official page before applying.
Start from the official opportunity page linked in this listing — it carries the sponsor's submission instructions.
The ONR Young Investigator Program, running since 1985, is one of the most valuable early-career awards in U.S. defense research: roughly 750,000 dollars over three years, awarded to the individual rather than to a project team, with wide latitude to define the research agenda so long as it addresses an area of interest to an ONR program officer. For AI researchers the relevant areas are autonomous maritime systems, human-machine teaming, machine learning for sensor fusion, and the broader autonomy portfolio that ONR has built out over the past decade. The eligibility window is narrow and strictly enforced: applicants must be in their first or second full-time tenure-track or tenure-track-equivalent academic appointment and must have received their PhD or equivalent degree on or after 1 January 2019. Faculty at U.S. institutions of higher education and those holding equivalent positions at U.S. nonprofits are eligible. That date cut-off moves each cycle, so anyone near the boundary should check it against the current NOFO rather than assume continuity from a prior year. The single most important tactical point about YIP, and the one that most distinguishes successful from unsuccessful applicants, is that proposals are evaluated against the interests of specific ONR program officers. Contacting the relevant program officer before writing, to confirm that the proposed direction matches an active need, is effectively a prerequisite rather than a courtesy - unsolicited proposals that no program officer has an appetite for do not fare well regardless of technical quality. The FY2027 competition is NOFO N0001426SF004, with full proposals due 30 October 2026 at 5:00pm Eastern.
The Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program is ONR's flagship early-career award, identifying scientists and engineers in academia and non-profit research institutions who show exceptional promise for creative basic and applied research aligned with naval science and technology priorities. The FY2027 competition runs under Notice of Funding Opportunity N0001426SF004. For AI researchers the programme is one of the more accessible routes into Navy funding: ONR's science and technology portfolio places sustained emphasis on autonomy, machine learning, autonomous and unmanned maritime and aerial systems, human-machine teaming, and AI for command and control and decision support, and YIP proposals are written to a programme officer's research interests rather than to a prescriptive topic list. That structure rewards applicants who make contact with the relevant ONR programme officer before writing, since the award is as much about alignment with a specific officer's portfolio as about raw technical merit. Unlike many federal early-career awards, YIP carries no requirement for a prior relationship with the agency and explicitly targets investigators in their first or second faculty appointment. Total funding available for the FY2027 cycle is 18,750,000 dollars across up to 25 awards, making this one of the larger early-career cohorts in defence basic research. Full proposals are due 30 October 2026, which makes this a near-term rather than a planning-horizon opportunity.
The U.S. Army's SBIR/STTR Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Open Topic provides non-dilutive funding to small businesses developing AI and machine learning solutions for defense applications such as supply chain management, logistics coordination, target identification, and modeling and simulation. Awards follow the standard SBIR/STTR structure: Phase I establishes technical feasibility (typically up to about $250,000) and Phase II funds development and demonstration (typically up to about $2,000,000), with Phase III for commercialization. Open-topic solicitations accept proposals on a periodic basis.
DARPA's TIAMAT (Transfer from Imprecise and Abstract Models to Autonomous Technologies) program develops sim-to-real transfer techniques that train autonomous systems in low-fidelity, abstract simulations and reliably deploy them in unpredictable physical environments. Research targets foundations for rapid sim-to-real generalization, robustness to physics-model error, and transfer learning across morphology and sensor configurations. The program is structured as two 18-month phases and supports applications including ground autonomy, aerial autonomy, and robotic manipulation in adversarial, novel, or contested settings. Awards have included University of Central Florida ($1.2M) and other academic and industry performers. TIAMAT is a core DARPA investment in foundational autonomy R&D.
DARPA's REMA (Rapid Experimental Missionized Autonomy) program enhances commercially available and stock military drones by adding an autonomy subsystem that increases the drone's capability and renders ineffective adversaries' electromagnetic countermeasures that disrupt operator-drone communication. The single-phase program develops a drone-autonomy adapter interface and mission-specific autonomy software, utilizing accelerating development spirals for tactical deployment. Focus areas include onboard AI inference for navigation, target recognition, and mission continuation in GPS-denied and jammed environments; foundation models for tactical autonomy; and modular autonomy stacks compatible with diverse commercial drone platforms. Managed by DARPA TTO under PM Phillip Smith.
The Department of the Navy pre-released FY26 Release 3 SBIR/STTR on June 3, 2026 — 12 BAA topics and one Commercial Solutions Opening for Counter-Unmanned Air Systems. Topics span adaptive sensor management, anomalous behavior detection, satellite imagery optimization, real-time zero-trust data for combat systems, and gun weapon systems modernization. Technical questions cut off June 23. Proposals open June 24 and close July 22. NAVAIR and NAVSEA co-host a Counter-UAS webinar June 16. Phase I funding tops out at $315,000. The CSO open topic for AI-powered drone defense is the structural news: it's the first time NAVAIR has used a CSO vehicle to fund counter-drone work outside the conventional Phase I/II structure, and it changes how small businesses can engage with the Navy's most urgent capability gap.
Read articleNOFO N0001426SF004 offers roughly 25 awards at $750,000 over 36 months to first- and second-appointment faculty. No cost share, no white paper stage — and an eligibility clock that admits PhDs earned on or after January 1, 2019 and nobody earlier. The program officer conversation, not the proposal, is the part most applicants get wrong.
Read articleOn June 3, the Department of the Navy pre-released FY26 Release 3 SBIR/STTR — 12 conventional BAA topics and a Counter-Unmanned Air Systems Commercial Solutions Opening. Topics span adaptive sensor management, anomalous behavior detection, satellite imagery optimization, real-time zero-trust data for combat systems, and gun weapon systems modernization. The proposal window runs June 24 to July 22, 2026. The technical questions cutoff is June 23. NAVAIR and NAVSEA are hosting a Counter-UAS webinar on June 16. Here is what the topic mix actually signals about Navy priorities and how small businesses should position.
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