Dr. Hugh H.T. Liu is an Associate Professor at the UTIAS and he currently serves as the Associate Director, Graduate Studies. His research work over the past several years has included a number of aircraft systems and control related areas, and he leads the “Flight Systems and Control” (FSC) Research Laboratory. Dr. Liu has published over 80 technical papers in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and he has one patent (US and Canada) pending. Dr. Liu has received several awards both from industry and academia. Dr. Liu is a member of IEEE, AIAA, and CASI, and is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario, Canada. Dr. Liu has served in technical committees of international professional organizations/associations. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and a member of the AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Technical Committee.
Research and development expertise of "Flight Systems and Control Laboratory” at the UTIAS is in the area of aircraft systems modeling, control, integration, and simulation. The main themes of our research programs include: 1) flight dynamics and control; 2) unmanned vehicle systems (UVS) autonomous motion and applications; 3) formation flight and cooperative control; and 4) systems simulation and integration. The goal of our research is to bring state-of-art control and integration techniques to improve or optimize aircraft systems performance.
Our recent and current research projects include:
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Formation flight of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with motion synchronization to improve accuracy in formation maneuver;
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Fail-safe flight control of failed or damaged control surfaces using advanced recovering control techniques;
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Fault-tolerant flight control of simultaneous stabilization;
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Integrated guidance and control of flying vehicles with nonlinear multi-objective control and optimization;
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UAV autonomous flight and cooperative control in surveillance, search and rescue, pursuit and evasion missions, wild fire monitoring, and robotic exploration;
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Flexible aircraft design, control, and optimization;
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Formation Flight of small satellites; and
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Real-time flight simulation.
Our research projects are supported and in collaboration with industry and government organizations such as Honeywell, Quanser Inc., and Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Research Highlights
Recent Publications