Grants and Research Awards

1. John Marshall University Undergraduate Creative Discovery and Research Scholar Award for Fall 2025, ”A Reinforcement Learning-based Algorithm for Labeled Data Generation,” Role: PI and faculty mentor, Student: Dylan Lester, Amount: $1,750 (for student) + $750 (for faculty mentor), Period: Aug. 18 - Dec 12, 2025.

2. NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant, "ACERS-GCVT: Adaptive Coverage and Exploration for Robotic Swarms Using Gaussian Distribution-Based Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation," Role: PI: Pingping Zhu, Amount: $22,172, Period: Jun. 1, 2025 - May 31, 2026. 

3. NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship, "Training YOLO Models with Assisted Labeling Techniques and RGB-D Fusion," Role: PI and Mentor: Pingping Zhu, Student: Dylan Lester, Amount: $5,000, Period: Jun. 1, 2025 - May 31, 2026. 

4. NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship, "Human Operator in Drone Swarm Control Loop," Role: PI and Mentor: Pingping Zhu, Student: Samuel Sutphin, Amount: $5,000, Period: Jun. 1, 2025 - May 31, 2026. 

5. John Marshall University Undergraduate Creative Discovery and Research Scholar Award for Spring 2025, ”Multi-Camera Gesture Recognition,” Role: PI and faculty mentor, Student: Samuel Sutphin, Amount: $1,750 (for student) + $750 (for faculty mentor), Period: January 13 - May 9, 2025.

6. NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant, "Study of Wasserstein Metric in Obstacle-Deployed Environments and Its Application to Multi-Scale Robotic Spatial Exploration Systems," Role: PI, Amount: $22,138, Period: Jun. 15, 2024 - Jul. 15, 2025. 

7. NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship, "Advancements in Autonomous Drone Operations: A Research Project on Obstacle Avoidance Techniques," Role: PI and Mentor, Student: Ben Taylor, Amount: $5,000, Period: April 10th, 2024- April 9th, 2025. 

8. NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship, "Advancements in Autonomous Drone Operations: Emergency Response and Recognition," Role: PI and Mentor, Student: Preston Sellards, Amount: $5,000, Period: April 10th, 2024- April 9th, 2025. 

9. NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship, "Human Interaction in Drone Operations," Role: PI and Mentor, Student: Mathew Allen, Amount: $5,000, Period: April 10th, 2024- April 9th, 2025. 

10. NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship, "Comparison of Penalty Terms of Obstacle Avoidance for Very-Large-Scale Robotic Systems," Role: PI and Mentor, Student: Jacob Lee, Amount: $5,000, Period: April 10th, 2024- April 9th, 2025. 

11. DARPA Collaborative Grant, "AI-CRAFT: Artificial Intelligence Cybersecurity Readiness and Future Training, funded by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency," Role: Senior Personnel at Marshall University, Amount (Marshall University): $1.25 M, Period: 2024-2026. PI at Marshall Univeristy: Dr. Haroon Malik. This collaborative project is led by Florida International University (FIU), and the other collaborator is West Virginia University (WVU). total grant amount of $4,499,555 for two years.

12. ERDC Grant, "Detection of Subterranean Threat Activity in Hard Rock Environments," Role: Co-PI, Amount: $2,998,647.46, Period: Feb. 1, 2024 - Jan. 31, 2026. PI: Dr. Greg Michaelson and other Co-PI: Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay and Dr. Mehdi Esmaeilpour.

13. ERDC Grant, "Automatic Assessment and Repair for Military Railroads," Role: Co-PI, Amount: $2,050,000.00, Period: Feb. 1, 2024 - Jan. 31, 2026. PI: Dr. Ammar Alzarrad and other Co-PI: Dr. Husnu Narman, Dr. Sudipta Chowdhury, Dr. Greg Michaelson, Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay.

14. NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant, "Centralized-Decentralized-Hybrid Control for Multi-Scale Robotic Spatial Exploration Systems," Role: PI, Amount: $21,868, Period: Jun. 1, 2023 - May 31, 2024. 

15. John Marshall University Scholars Awards for Spring 2023, "An Adaptive Distributed Optimal Control for Decentralized Very-Large-Scale-Robotic Systems," Role: PI, Award: Four-courses release in Spring 2023.