 The mission of this PEI is to bring a diverse set of expertise together to solve big problems in this connected and autonomous space. What we do in autonomous and connected systems, we kind of define that as kind of three major areas, robotics, autonomy, and innovative things, technologies. And these are all inherently interdisciplinary areas. So it's very hard to find someone who's an expertise in all the areas, even in this one thrust area. One of the unexpected opportunities that arose from this is that we're able to naturally get together multiple schools, Purdue Engineering, College of Engineering, the Polytech, and the School of Science. And when you start bringing, you know, eight, ten departments together working on these multidisciplinary problems, that's what we really need to do to have impact. Our students like it, and industry likes that because industry doesn't think in academic departments. They think about how we're going to solve problems. Purdue has great faculty, great students, and they're very focused on what they're doing. And sometimes that can get siloed. And so we want to bring those silos down, bring the walls down. People see what they're doing, make those connections, so we can actually make bigger progress and a bigger impact. The impact of this PEI is the result of our faculty coming together from a diverse group and having some great successes at both the state and the national level at attracting funding. And that spans not only government agencies, but private sector companies. So initially there was no funding tied to the ACS initiative. However, recently we have gotten some seed funds from the college. We would like to see some of these seed projects now take off. Some of them are academic-based, trying to scale up some of our classes that we have right now. And also some are research-based. So can these seed products turn into fully funded projects by external organizations? So we're excited to see where these lead. The seed grant specifically means that that's not just a cool thing someone told me. I can spend a year having a student go and investigate that direction. It's a win-win no matter what. So we set out this project with the idea of we're going to try to adapt our robotic technology to a more space environment and some of the challenges that are associated with that. If we failed on the whole space environment thing, we're still doing cool work in the other directions that we had here that can directly impact other grants we're putting out. There's a little bit of that freedom to explore and that's fantastic and allows us to make those big impactful changes. What ACS has really done is given us a framework to kind of start those discussions, start those collaborations and giving an area where I can present my work and say, hey, what do you guys think? Produce a uniquely positioned to lead a Thompson and Connected Systems Initiative. The sheer numbers of people we have working in these areas across the whole College of Engineering, one of the largest College of Engineering in the country. We have the faculty. We have the students. We have the resources. We have the facilities. We can tackle these big problems that really can't be tackled by other groups or institutions.