Our lab is interested in engineering and understanding collaborative autonomy and assured autonomy. We study many topics on the borders of control theory, artificial intelligence, formal methods, and cognitive science. Currently our research focuses on:

  • Trustworthy AI/CPS, particularly safety and explanability
  • Adaptive human-autonomy teaming
  • Cognitive neuroengineering
  • Autonomous UAS and UAS swarms
  • AI and aerial robotics for agricultural, environmental, public health, and defense applications

Our lab accepts students from MAE, CS, and BME. If you are interested in joining our lab, please read this first before contacting us.

Recent Lab News


  • 06/06/2022 Six undergraduate students who have worked in our lab as researchers over the past two years will graduate at the end of this academic year. Marie will be commissioned as a 2Lt and pilot in the USAF; Ayush and Sid will join the PhD program of UC Davis; Shuhao will join the MS program of UCLA; Sri will join the MS program of CMU; Graham will join Lumentum as a mechanical engineer. Congrats to all! We wish you all a bright future!
  • 06/03/2022 Evan Foley has successfully completed his MS project "Optimal Control of Multiple UAVs for Wildfire Fighting". He will join Lockheed Martin. Congrats Evan. We wish him a bright future! 
  • 05/09/2022 Our paper "Brain-Machine Interfaces: From Restoring Sensorimotor Control to Augmenting Cognition" is now available online.
  • 04/26/2022 Our paper "Modeling and Validation of Electric Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System Energy Dynamics" is now available online.
  • 04/20/2022 Our paper "Neurophysiological and behavioral differences in human-multiagent tasks: An EEG network perspective" is now available online.
  • 04/12/2022 Dr. Kong will join a trans-disciplinary panel discussion (Team Research Forum: Preparing for the Next Pandemic) about future research needed to address technical and scientific challenges for pandemic preparedness.
  • 03/04/2022 Our paper "Vision-based 2D navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles in riverine environments with imitation learning" is now available online.
  • 02/16/2022 Two of our projects "Open-Source Infrastructure to Accelerate Scaling of Agricultural AI Technologies" and "Towards An End-to-end Explainable Diet Recommendation System" has been selected for funding by the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems (AIFS). We will work with Drs. Earles, Bailey, Vougioukas, Kisekka, Pourreza, and Jin on the first project and Drs. Lemay, Liu, Tagkopoulos, and Chen on the second project.
  • 02/02/2022 Our paper "Energy-efficient UAV trajectory generation based on system-level modeling of multi-physical dynamics" has been accepted by the American Control Conference (ACC).
  • 01/18/2022 Fanyu will present our work on "Autonomous Greenhouse Control: A Bayesian Optimization and Model-based Reinforcement Learning Approach" at the International Conference on Digital Technologies for Sustainable Crop Production (DIGICROP).
  • 12/20/2021 Dr. Kong will join two new editorial boards starting 2022: Frontiers in Aerospace Engineering & Technology Conferences Editorial Board (TCEB).
  • 12/10/2021 Our lab has received a research grant from CITRIS on "Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle Swarms for Large-Scale and Real-Time Air Toxic Measurement near Wildland-Urban-Interface Fires". Our collaborators include Dr. Deborah Bennett, Dr. Thomas Young, and Dr. Anthony Wexler. We are very excited to work on this project!
  • 12/09/2021 Jailan Sabet has successfully completed her MS project "Classification of EEG Signals Utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks". She will join Reltio as a software engineering. Congrats Jailan. We wish her a bright future! 
  • 11/12/2021 Ryan Liang has successfully completed his MS thesis "Vision-Based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation in Virtual Complex Environment using Deep Reinforcement Learning". He will join Sandia National Laboratories. Congrats Ryan. We wish him a bright future! 
  • 10/19/2021 Our paper "Drones: Innovative Technology for Use in Precision Pest Management" has won the Journal of Economic Entomology Editor’s Choice Award.
  • 08/11/2021 Our lab alumnus, Gang Chen, will join South China University of Technology as an Assistant Professor. Congrats, Gang! Wish you a bright future!
  • 08/01/2021 Our team (led by Dr. Xin Liu, Dr. Mason Earles and Dr. Kong) participated in the 3rd International Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge and got 2nd among 45 teams in the part B Machine Learning section.
  • 07/27/2021 Our paper "Interpretable Fault Diagnosis for Cyber-physical Systems: A Learning Perspective" is now available online.
  • 07/23/2021 Andrew will join Advance.Farm. Congratulations, Andrew. We wish you a bright future!
  • 06/21/21 Our lab has received a research grant from the Sony Corporation on "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarms for Large-Scale, Real-Time, and Intelligent Disaster Responses". We are very excited to work with Sony on the project!

In the Press

Location

Contact Us
academic surge, room 2328
one shields ave.
davis, CA 95616
zdkong (at) ucdavis (dot) edu