Grants and Contributions

Not a Project (Mandated or Core Funding)

Not a Project (Mandated or Core Funding)

Not a Project (Mandated or Core Funding)

Not a Project (Mandated or Core Funding)

Not a Project (Mandated or Core Funding)

Build & Operate will create the software necessary to automate production using a number of third-party collaborative robots on manufacturing floors, including those of Fanuc, Doosan, Universal Robots, Kinova & Epson, allowing for a seamless transition of the robot from the simulated environment to the work environment (DEPLOY). It will then provide the software necessary to operate (OPERATE) complex automated programs in this multi-vendor environment and monitor all of them in a unified network, as if they all belong to the same vendor.

Forage is developing the first fully off-grid mushroom farm, capable of operation in nearly any geography or climate, using renewable energy. By creating a sustainable and rapidly deployable mushroom farming technology, we will reduce the strain on food supply chain and the distance between farm to fork.

When light beams travel through the atmosphere, they are deformed because of variations in temperature, humidity and wind conditions. This makes reconstruction of the signal carried by the light beam very challenging. Wavefront sensing approaches allows one to measure such deformations so that they can corrected. However, doing so efficiently is extremely challenging. The Project aims to develop a better understanding of the fundamental limits of wavefront sensing and to apply advanced ML/AI techniques to optimize the sensing approach. This work will further the development of broadband wavefront sensing systems targeted at space-to?ground optical communications.

The Nunatsiavut Government leads one of the most comprehensive plastic pollution monitoring programs in the Arctic, including monitoring of water, ice, shorelines, and animals. This project builds on existing Inuit-led research in this area and uses capacity sharing (rather than capacity building) to work with new and returning partners to extend this work in two ways. First, monitoring will focus on birds caught for food for which there are no existing plastic ingestion baselines in the region (or the world). Secondly, we will link plastic pollution with heavy metal contamination since plastics are known to act as a vector for heavy metals. We will compare this new baseline data to colonial archival samples of birds collected from Nunatsiavut to investigate trends in heavy metals and their relationship to changes from climate change, the introduction of consumer plastics to the North, and other temporal points of significance. Additionally, we will identify sources of macro plastics on shorelines using new forensics based in collective community knowledge, and link these sources to micro plastics ingested by animals to provide input on meaningful intervention into plastic pollution control and mitigation from human activities. This research will be directed and validated by continuous community review and evaluation through land-based workshops aimed at recognizing that local knowledge holders are the main experts within that space and environment. Together, these activities will be used to inform plastic pollution, heavy metal contamination, and Inuit food way governance and mitigation by the Nunatsiavut Government.

By combining Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ), satellite data and state-of-the?art unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs, or drones), the team will co?produce new information on sea ice and snow roughness and slush for the operational SmartICE Ice Travel Safety Maps. The production of these maps may be piloted in partner Nunavut communities of Arctic Bay, Gjoa Haven, Pond Inlet, Qikiqtarjuaq, and a Nunavik community, and eventually be expanded to all SmartICE communities (>24) in Inuit Nunangat. The approach will be grounded in IQ, and include a co-designed Inuit training program for UAV-based sea ice monitoring to augment the mature environmental data collection developed by SmartICE. The team will adapt UAVs and sensors to collect high-resolution topographic and electromagnetic data for local travel safety maps, as well as ground-truth a series of novel satellite products of sea-ice thickness and roughness, based on optical and micro-wave frequencies. With the Arctic Eider Society partner, a growing network of Inuit Nunangat communities will be able to access in near real-time these new satellite and in-situ data products and SmartICE Ice Travel Safety Maps through the Indigenous Knowledge Social Network platform (SIKU). At the request of the SmartICE Community Management Committees, the local travel safety maps will also be distributed in paper format within communities.