LSU Student Spotlight: Grant Muslow Tackles Maritime Autonomy with Integer

Defense tech innovation at Integer is fueled not only by cutting-edge software engineering and strategic partnerships — but also by the rising talent helping bring these ideas to life.

As part of our ongoing collaboration with LSU, we’re proud to shine a light on one of the exceptional graduate students working with our Baton Rouge team: Grant Muslow, currently pursuing a master’s in Electrical Engineering.

With a passion for solving complex problems and a drive to apply his academic knowledge to real-world challenges, Grant is helping advance our joint program with LSU to improve the autonomy for maritime vessels.

Integer + LSU: Enhancing Situational Awareness of Ocean-Going Unmanned Systems

We’re currently partnered with LSU to enhance the situational awareness and decision-making capabilities of ocean-going autonomous vehicles. Our collaboration aims to improve the intelligence, autonomy, and communication of distributed networks of maritime intelligent autonomous systems for naval operators.

As a result, we opened a permanent research and development office in the Louisiana Emerging Technology Center Building on LSU’s flagship campus in Baton Rouge, supported by our Louisiana-based scientists, engineers, and staff, and a pipeline of qualified LSU graduates like Grant who get to work with our experienced team on real world projects.

The Partnership at a Glance

The LSU-Integer team is developing software engineering, AI, and machine learning approaches to enable unmanned and autonomous underwater vehicles with three essential functions:

1. Make sense of data to determine its importance to the mission.
2. Communicate securely, effectively, and efficiently with other assets, especially in degraded environments.
3. Independently determine best actions through global models, particularly in scenarios with high uncertainty.

The partnership positions LSU and Integer to build broader capabilities that could serve U.S. defense and national security needs, including to secure maritime and cyber-physical critical infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. The team is developing and testing prototypes in waters off Louisiana’s ports and coast in real-world conditions, with an eye toward dual-use technologies with applications in domestic port security, offshore energy, and ocean and coastal remote sensing.

Meet Grant

Grant is a master’s student in Electrical Engineering at LSU, where he also earned his bachelor’s in Computer Science and Computer Engineering last year. He started out as a Computer Science and Business double major, but he quickly discovered his love for Computer Engineering.

“I began at LSU in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, and we had nothing to do but sit in our rooms. I got bored one day and decided to Google ‘How can machines learn?’ My mind was blown, and the rest is history.”

After that first revelation about his interest in machine learning, Grant joined the LSU AI team where they studied bioinformatics, a field of science that develops methods for understanding biological data. Specifically, Grant and the team studied proteins and how they interact with each other.

“We used AI to model those different actions. I’ve been on that team for over three years now and it’s exciting to see the significant advancements we’ve made in bioinformatics,” he said.

As a part-time Machine Learning Engineer at LSU, he’s already begun building an impressive resume that bridges both academic research and industry collaboration.

Grant (third from the left) pictured with his teammates at his company, FarmSmarter, holding up a giant check. The team won at the Rice Business Plan Competition, one of the most prestigious business competition in the US!).

“I took a large language models class my senior year that was taught by three professors, one of whom owns an AI company, and we built a system dedicated to agriculture in our research lab,” he said.

That system turned into the company FarmSmarter Growing Technologies, which offers an AI-powered platform that supports farmers and gardeners in making data-informed crop management decisions. Grant is the Chief Technology Officer and Cofounder. By integrating LSU AgCenter research with advanced analytics, he’s helped develop this tool that brings machine learning into the hands of everyday users.

Now, through his work with Integer, Grant is bringing that same energy and curiosity to defense tech.

“There are a lot of parallels with what I’m doing with my company in the AI space and what we’re doing at Integer,” he said.

Leveraging AI for Predictive Autonomy

Grant is working with us on a simulator for an underwater acoustic environment to enable better communication for unmanned underwater vehicles.

“Submersibles have to communicate via sound waves. They can’t communicate like our phones do, because the electromagnetic waves our phones produce to talk to each other are absorbed by seawater. Communication is a lot slower underwater, meaning you can’t send as much data in the same amount of time.”

He continued: “We need to engineer a solution to get around the limitations of communicating underwater. We’re creating computer simulations which emulate the underwater environment to help develop a solution.”

In the underwater environment, Grant said, there are many parameters that affect communications. “When you have all these parameters, that is screaming for someone to use AI to optimize the system,” he said.

However, our team is taking it one step further than traditional use of AI. Autonomous systems today primarily follow preset instructions but, as our COO and Cofounder Josh Knight, Ph.D., recently told Inside Unmanned Systems: “The real world doesn’t work like that. Environments change. Vehicles degrade. Missions evolve. Autonomy has to keep up.”

We’re combining state-of-the-art machine learning techniques with physics-based models to enhance autonomy software and support human operators in understanding complex environments, predicting future outcomes, and adapting in real time.

“I specialize in AI in electrical engineering and enjoy connecting all our different modules together, so they form a coherent simulation. One of the benefits of developing a simulation like this is the extreme loads of data we’re able to produce that can train AI models.”

Looking Ahead

Grant looks forward to continuing his work in an ever-changing industry he knows will keep him on his toes.

“AI is already reshaping engineering — and if you’re not staying up to date, you’ll fall behind fast. This field is evolving at a pace we haven’t seen before. Just a few years ago, groundbreaking papers in areas like underwater autonomy or reinforcement learning protocols came out every few years. Now, we’re seeing new research, tools, and models emerge every few months.”

Grant said what’s especially exciting is the integration of advanced AI, like reinforcement learning algorithms, into specialized domains such as underwater environments.

“It’s both exhilarating and demanding. The rapid pace means engineers need to continuously explore new models and tools, many of which didn’t even exist a year ago,” he said. “But it’s also what makes this such an exciting time to be in the field. AI isn’t just a buzzword, it’s producing serious, tangible advances across all areas of engineering.”

If you’re interested in partnering with us, visit https://www.integer-tech.com/partnerships/ to learn more about how we collaborate with universities.

Or, if you’re a student and want to see our open job opportunities, visit https://www.integer-tech.com/careers/.