What project 1501 buys
The Autonomy/ AI Project conducts foundational research in: machine learning, reasoning and intelligence; automated image, scene, and signal understanding; large-scale distributed decision making; transferring learning and sharing knowledge across domains; creating trusted and explainable artificial intelligence; and human-AI collaboration techniques. Results of this research will lead to trusted, advanced AI techniques that will solve more complex tasks and enhance autonomy for DON systems and missions.
Project 1501 funding, FY2025–FY2031
Prior years are actuals, the budget year is the request, and the outyears are the FYDP plan. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure. Projects carry the full five-year plan; the activities inside them stop at the budget year.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 0.0 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 2.9 |
| FY2027 | Request | 27.7 |
| FY2028 | Outyear | 24.3 |
| FY2029 | Outyear | 26.4 |
| FY2030 | Outyear | 25.9 |
| FY2031 | Outyear | 25.5 |
4 accomplishments / planned programs
The R-2A exhibit — the only level of the budget that describes work that has not happened yet. Activities carry the prior, current and budget year only, no five-year plan. 1 of them describes FY2027 work in enough detail to have its own page; the rest are shown here in full. Coverage is partial across the corpus, so count activities, never total them.
- Continue research exploring integration of domain knowledge and physical models with machine learning for fast, robust learning of diverse complex concepts and tasks without the need for labeled data. - Continue research efforts regarding the use of artificial intelligence to advance the scientific understanding of AI-machine…
Read the FY2027 plan →FY2027 planned work Science of Autonomy and Control of Unmanned Systems Research investigations regarding critical multidisciplinary autonomy challenges that cut across areas/domains, including air, sea, undersea and ground. Research efforts include the following: Continue: - Investigating the scalable and robust distributed collaboration among autonomous systems. - Research on human/unmanned system collaboration. - Work on perception-based adaptation across uncertain naval environments. - Investigating embodied and situated intelligence and architectures. - Developing theory-based tools and methods for safe, assured, robust, verifiable, and trustable autonomy - Both exploratory and confirmatory research with…
FY2026 to FY2027 change The funding increase from FY 2026 to FY 2027 is due to an internal realignment of resources within PE 0601153N from Proj 1507 (Naval Aerospace) to Proj 1501 (Autonomy/AI) for research area prioritization on developing new general foundational theory and methods for adversarial autonomy in naval domains. Planned programs have been updated to align to current focus area. This is not a new start.
FY2027 planned work Machine Reasoning and Intelligence: - Continue developing the science base and computational methods for building versatile intelligent agents, which can function autonomously in uncertain, unstructured, uncontrolled, open-world environments, and can collaborate seamlessly with humans and other agents. - Continue basic research for developing robust computer vision systems, based on human vision, for automated understanding of surveillance imagery, perception for autonomous agents, and managing image/video libraries for after-action analysis and planning. - Continue basic research in machine self-learning for intelligent agents, inspired by human learning, for understanding real-world…
FY2026 to FY2027 change The funding increase from FY 2026 to FY 2027 is due to an internal realignment of resources within PE 0601153N from Project Unit 1502: C5ISR/Naval Space to Project Unit 1501: Autonomy/AI in support of basic research in control and decision-making in networks of dynamic agents under uncertainties in perception and network models.
FY2026 to FY2027 change The decrease in funding from FY 2026 to FY 2027 is due to the realignment and consolidation of all expeditionary funding under PE 0601153N to the new Expeditionary Campaigns project number 1510 within this PE. Planned programs have been updated to align to current expeditionary and naval priorities.
FY2026 plans — current year - Complete a focused research effort for discovery research on multi-class, multi-objective deep reinforced learning algorithms with automated training. (Expeditionary Warfare) - Complete research into deception, degradation, and manipulation of artificial intelligence algorithms in perception/action loops. (Expeditionary Warfare) - Complete research on understanding generalized theoretical foundations and limitations of predicting, deceiving, and disrupting artificial intelligence algorithms embedded in the perception/action loops of autonomous systems. (Expeditionary Warfare) - Complete effort to lay the theoretical and methodological foundations for detecting threats using social media…