UCLA Engineer Receives Nearly $1M in Government Funding for Agricultural Research

Assoc. Prof. Jawed

UCLA Samueli

Oct 10, 2024

UCLA Samueli Newsroom

Khalid Jawed, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, recently received nearly $1 million in federal and state funding to lead research in precision agriculture technologies.

A four-year, $728,000 grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will sponsor the creation of technology to capture and create 3D reconstructions of farming environments. A separate three-year, $253,000 grant from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) will supports his research into drone-based pest control. Together, the grants total $981,000.

With the funding from NIFA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Jawed aims to develop and test an unmanned ground vehicle capable of scanning and traversing farmlands to collect imaging data. His research group will use the data to model a virtual environment that simulates different possibilities for crop growth over time in a new non-invasive application of precision agriculture. This research will be done in collaboration with California farms.

The grant is a part of NIFA’s $7.4 million investment in data science for food and agricultural systems, spread across 14 awards. Priority is given to projects that focus on animal management, co- and by-products of animal production, and societal aspects of animal welfare Other awardees include UC Riverside for aerial robot data collection and Arizona State University for digital modeling of underwater systems.

Jawed’s second project is funded by CDPR, an offshoot of the California Environmental Protection Agency. The initiative aims to develop a drone capable of assisting with pest control in high tunnels — unheated, semi-permanent structures that act like greenhouses to aid in crop protection and temperature regulation, and where a lack of easy access makes conventional pest control methods ineffective. On this project, Jawed is collaborating with multiple partners, including UCLA startup Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Intelligence, and leveraging knowledge in computer vision, artificial intelligence and robotics. 

A faculty member at UCLA Samueli since 2017, Jawed was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2021 for his work in soft robotics. He runs the Structures-Computer Interaction Laboratory at UCLA, which combines mechanics, robotics, computer graphics and machine learning to create robots and smart structures for use in agriculture, soft robotics and manufacturing. 

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