Aircraft Flight Systems and Control

Professor H. H. T. Liu
University of Toronto
Institute for Aerospace Studies
4925 Dufferin St., Ontario, Canada M3H 5T6

Phone:  +1-416-667-7928
Fax: +1-416-667-7799
Email: liu (at) utias.utoronto.ca
Web: www.flight.utias.utoronto.ca/

Education

  • Ph.D. – University of Toronto
  • M.A.Sc. – Beijing University
  • B.A.Sc. – Shanghai University

Research Overview

Dr. Hugh H.T. Liu is a full Professor at UTIAS and he currently serves as the Associate Director, Graduate Studies. Dr. Liu is an internationally leading researcher in the area of aircraft systems and control, and he leads the “Flight Systems and Control” (FSC) Research Laboratory. Dr. Liu has published over 100 technical papers in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and he has received one patent (US and Canada) on his work on motion synchronization. He has significant research contributions in autonomous unmanned systems development, cooperative control, and integrated modeling and simulation. He also serves on editorial boards and technical committees of international professional societies. Before his academic appointment, Dr. Liu has several years’ industrial experience where he participated and led development projects of aircraft environmental control systems. Dr. Liu is a Fellow of CSME, Associate Fellow of AIAA, and an active member of IEEE, CASI.

The research interests of the “Flight Systems and Control Laboratory” at the UTIAS cover the following themes/areas: (1) systems modeling, simulation and control; (2) multi-vehicle systems estimation and control; and (3) autonomous unmanned vehicle systems (UVS) applications. The goal of our research is to bring state-of-art control and integration techniques to improve or optimize aircraft systems performance.

Our recent research projects include:

Systems Modeling, Simulation and Control

  • Aeroservoelastic wing and active control¬
  • Landing gear thermo-tribo-mechanical model development
  • Aircraft systems simulation and integration
  • Fail-safe flight and fault tolerant control

Multi-vehicle Systems Estimation and Control

  • Vision-based surveillance and sensing using multi-UAVs
  • Quadrotor UAV vision-based target tracking
  • Motion synchronization formation control
  • Cooperative multi-vehicle forest fire monitoring

Autonomous UVS Applications

  • Autonomous localization and mapping
  • Autonomous Soaring Surveillance
  • Autonomous target interception for border patrol vehicles