UCR and BCOE have been awarded with two equipment grants from ARO and ONR led by faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. These are: (1) ARO DURIP – PI Karydis (Co-PIs: Roy-Chowdhury, Mourikis, Pasqualetti, Farrell); $350,000, to build an 100x50x30 ft outdoor motion tracking arena for robotics experimentation. (2) ONR DURIP – PI Roy-Chowdhury (Co-PIs: Karydis, Mourikis, Pasqualetti, Shelton); $428,331, to acquire new robots and necessary computing units for learning-based robot navigation. The two awards complement each other very well, and will greatly elevate the research on robotics, autonomy, and machine intelligence that is conducted at UCR. Specifically, the ARO grant will create a state-of-the art facility to fly UAVs outdoors in a safe and contained area, test ground robots in long missions, and operate autonomous sensor-based navigation in much closer to real-world settings than inside the traditional lab. The ONR grant will allow us to acquire state-of-the-art UAVs and ground (wheeled and legged) robots that can enable new research directions, as well as a new computational cluster to develop machine intelligence which is much needed for modern robotics applications.