NVIDIA Awards Next-Gen Tech to UH Mānoa for AI Farming

• University of Hawaiʻi receives NVIDIA grant empowering AinaFarm project advancing scalable AI-driven agricultural robotics research.
• Project integrates robotics and vision-language-action AI to automate farming tasks under real-world conditions efficiently and sustainably.
• Grant provides advanced GPUs, Jetson systems, training, boosting interdisciplinary collaboration across Hawaiʻi agricultural sciences research.

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa has a substantial impetus for conducting agriculture-related research work through an NVIDIA Academic Grant Program because it will be getting the most advanced computing power for AI from this program for an innovative project named “AinaFarm: Building the Foundation for Scalable Agricultural Physical AI.”

The team for this project consists of Assistant Professor Huaijin Chen from the Department of Information and Computer Sciences, as well as Professor Daniel Jenkins from the Department of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences, along with recent Ph.D. holder Mohsen Paryavi in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The project aims to utilize robotics and “artificial intelligence  AI” for helping agriculture-related tasks in an effective way.

The AinaFarm initiative is under the Robotics and Edge AI category and involves an investigation into cutting-edge technologies such as vision-language-action models that have the capability to help robots view their surroundings and be able to execute tasks based on instructions without human direction.

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 Under the grant applied for, NVIDIA has contributed top-of-the-line equipment to UH Mānoa in the form of two RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, which are meant for the development and execution of complex AI models, as well as four Jetson AGX Orin supercomputers that will be referred to as the “brain” for farm robots.

Apart from the hardware components, this grant also includes opportunities for greater visibility through the provision of presentation sessions, among other promotional activities, as well as access to AI models and training.

 According to the researchers involved in this proposal, this funding will aid in matters concerning labor in local farming, as it will provide scalable AI specifically for Hawaii farming conditions.

The NVIDIA Academic Grant Program aims to promote research in academia by offering access to high-performance computing and software to help transform research ideas into applications.

Research at AinaFarm will require collaboration throughout the College of Natural Sciences, Engineering, and a newly named college: the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience, leveraging success at the university with agricultural robotics.