除了军事用途外，无人飞机（通常称为无人机）也有大量的科学和民用应用。我们的研究专注于路径规划，控制，状态估计和数据融合，尤其适用于小型无人飞机的导航，避障和远程飞行。这项研究有两个主要方向：第一，改善对车辆周围环境的感知（即，将传感器数据转换为可操作的智能），第二，改善车辆的持久性（即，可以保留的时间长度）站上以及它在飞行中可以覆盖的距离）。在许多情况下，我们的研究是受生物启发的：我们正在开发自动飞行的算法，该算法可使小型无人机飞升，从大气层中收集能量。最终，我们寻求开发一种能够飞腾的，自主的微型无人机，
In addition to military uses, unmanned aircraft (commonly known as drones) are seeing significant scientific and civil applications. Our research focuses on path planning, control, state estimation and data fusion, applied especially to navigation, obstacle avoidance, and long-range flight of small uninhabited aircraft. There are two main thrusts to this research: first, improving perception of the vehicle's surroundings (i.e., turning sensor data into actionable intelligence), second, improving the vehicle's persistence (i.e., the length of time it can remain on station and the distance that it can cover in flight). In many cases our research is bio-inspired: we are developing algorithms for autonomous flight that allow small UAVs to soar, harvesting energy from the atmosphere. Ultimately, we seek to develop a soaring-capable, autonomous, mini-UAV that is equipped with a sophisticated sensing system that will be able to follow a migrating bird and provide close-up in-flight video, as well as in situ atmospheric measurements.