Our Mission
The Unmanned Systems Lab at UT San Antonio works on learning, teaming, and control for unmanned aircraft in collaboration with human partners. We design the airframes, the flight control boards, the software, AI/ML algorithms, human-AI teaming strategies, and we test them outdoors. We deliver results that deploy in real world.
Research
Four directions
Learning, autonomy, and human-machine collaboration
Unmanned systems need enough onboard intelligence to cut human workload rather than add to it. We work on reinforcement learning, preference-based and human-guided learning, multi-objective and fair policy optimization, and language-model agents for teaming.
Guidance, control, and multi-agent coordination
The lab has a long record in distributed coordination, consensus, containment, and event-triggered control. Current work is in nonlinear guidance for target enclosing and interception, safety-critical guidance under input constraints, and flexible leader–follower formation of fixed-wing aircraft.
Cyber-physical systems and security
Connecting physical systems through the cyber domain creates capability and exposure at the same time. We study where the vulnerabilities are, what they cost operationally, and how to predict and mitigate them.
Trustworthiness and flight validation
Research moves into practice only if it is validated on real hardware in real conditions. The lab designs its own small aircraft, including the airframe, the flight control board with onboard computing, the software, and the sensing modules.
News
Recent
USL was featured at the Texas Standard. Read Here
Yongcan Cao was elected Associate Fellow of AIAA.
Sergio Deleon joins Raytheon as an electrical engineer. Congratulations!
Welcome Jared Garza to USL.
USL received two grants ($620K) from the Office of Naval Research. Thank you, ONR!
Welcome Hung Chu, Ines Hans Capitan, Sergio Deleon, Miguel Elizondo, and Luis Gonzalez to USL.
Congratulations to Mingkang Wu on his PhD. Mingkang joins Path Robotics as a machine learning engineer.
Director
Yongcan Cao
Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at UTSA, and holder of the Mary Lou Clarke Endowed Distinguished Professorship. His research is in robotics, autonomy, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and human–robot interaction.
He chairs the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Manufacturing Automation and Robotic Control, and serves as Associate Editor for Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics. He is an Associate Fellow of AIAA, a Microsoft President’s Endowed Fellow, an AFOSR Summer Faculty Fellow, and a recipient of the National Research Council Research Associateship Award at AFRL.
Google Scholar · yongcan.cao@utsa.edu · (210) 458-6269