Openings
Join the lab
We take PhD, master’s, and undergraduate students who want to build things that fly and prove they work.
What you would work on
Students here do not pick between theory and hardware. A typical project runs from a control or learning formulation through to a flight test on an aircraft the lab built. Recent student work has appeared in Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, AAAI, AAMAS, RA-L, NeurIPS/ICML workshops, and the Reinforcement Learning Conference.
Where our students go
Graduates have gone to SpaceX, Raytheon, Path Robotics, Nvidia, Amazon, Dell, Bosch, NXP, General Motors, Corvid Technologies, Southwest Research Institute, and the Army Research Laboratory. Others continued to graduate school at Cornell, UC Berkeley, Rice, Texas A&M, and UT Austin, including one DoD SMART Scholarship. A former postdoc is now a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati.
How to apply
Prospective PhD students. Apply to the UTSA Electrical Engineering PhD program and name the Unmanned Systems Lab in your statement. Email Dr. Cao with your CV, your transcript, and one paragraph on what you want to work on.
Current UTSA students. Email Dr. Cao with your CV and the courses you have taken. Undergraduate researchers are welcome and many have co-authored papers.
yongcan.cao@utsa.edu