We lead controls research, dealing with the position, direction, safety and communication aspects of a single vehicle or swarm of vehicles in motion through air, water or space.
We offer courses in the guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned aerial systems as well as the optimization and control of networked systems. We are leaders in research in control of autonomous systems, bio-inspired engineering, model predictive control, dynamical modeling, and estimation for single and distributed systems. We develop tools that address the temporal, spatial and nonlinear challenges posed by autonomy.
A&A undergrad and graduate students have the opportunity to explore practical applications for autonomy by gaining hands-on flight-testing and field operations experience with interdisciplinary collaborators and partners.
Key research areas
- Automatic control
- Autonomous vehicle control
- Control theory
- Dynamics and optimization
- Flight operations
- Underwater vehicle design
- Unmanned aerial systems
Associated faculty
Research highlights
NASA’s SPLICE is the landing app Apollo didn’t have
Researchers in the Autonomous Control Lab and the RAIN Lab developed guidance algorithms to help land spacecrafts in areas that we don’t have mapped out well.
A successful Mars rover landing ends with a crash
A&A’s Behcet Açıkmeşe helped develop hurling algorithms to land NASA's rovers Curiosity and Perseverance.
A&A's Research Takes Flight
A&A research will get the rare opportunity to fly in real flight conditions on the 2021 Boeing ecoDemonstrator.
Hide and Seek
The Autonomous Flight Systems Lab builds a drone-based machine learning dataset to find those lost in the wilderness.
Award-winning student team
