NASA ULI Annual Review 2026
The AVIATE Center recently hosted the NASA ULI Annual Review 2026, marking the conclusion of the NASA University Leadership Initiative project on Robust and Resilient Autonomy for Advanced Air Mobility.
The two-day review brought together faculty, researchers, students, postdocs, industry partners, NASA stakeholders, advisory board members, and outreach leaders to reflect on the project’s technical progress and broader impact.
The program highlighted advances in safe autonomy, adaptive control, robust perception, fault diagnosis, reachability analysis, airspace management, simulation, verification, and outreach for future advanced air mobility systems.
A major strength of the project was its deeply collaborative and diverse team, anchored at UIUC and strengthened by partners from leading universities, industry, and government.
This breadth of expertise helped connect foundational research with translational pathways toward safer, more resilient, and more scalable autonomous air mobility.
The final review also underscored the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration across controls, autonomy, aerospace systems, robotics, AI, verification, and human-centered operations.
As the AVIATE center moves into its next phase, the outcomes of this NASA ULI effort provide a strong foundation for continued research, demonstration, and real-world impact.
The event served not only as a closeout review but also as a celebration of the people, partnerships, and shared vision that made the project possible.
Recordings
Overview of the ULI Project “Robust and Resilient Autonomy for Advanced Air Mobility” — Prof. Naira Hovakimyan — 00:07:27
“SAFE Flight Tests on X-62A VISTA” — Dr. James Ramsey, Lockheed Martin — 00:22:08
Autonomy Fest Overview — Prof. Christos Papachristos — 01:00:57
“A unified language for integration of LEC components with L1 adaptive control” — Dr. Aditya Gahlawat — 01:37:59
“Certifiably Safe and Robust Perception for Urban Air Mobility” — Prof. Lui Sha, Mikael Yeghiazaryan — 02:09:50
“Covariance Steering Perception-Based Landing Architecture” — Prof. Evangelos Theodorou — 03:03:43
“Covariance Steering Perception-Based Landing Architecture” — Prof. Evangelos Theodorou — 00:00:00 (continued)
“Runtime Fault Diagnosis and Reachability Analysis for In-Flight Contingency Management” — Prof. Ali Karimoddini — 00:29:50
“Network Logistics and Planning Problems in Airspace Management: AI for Parameterized Sequential Decision-Making Problems” — Prof. Srinivasa Salapaka — 00:49:52
“Reachability Analysis for Feasible Task Assignment” — Prof. Melkior Ornik — 01:12:58
“Real-Time Bayesian Fault Diagnosis over High-Dimensional Fault Spaces” — Prof. Ioannis Raptis — 01:27:17
“Simulation Development for Robust and Resilient Autonomy for Advanced Mobility” — Prof. Petros Voulgaris and Prof. Hyung-Jin Yoon — 01:48:28
“Verification of Multi-UAM Scenarios” — Prof. Sayan Mitra — 02:10:12
Presentation by Dr. Yingke Li on behalf of Prof. Chuchu Fan — 02:35:45
“Outreach: Engaging the Next Generation” — Dr. Jessica Peterson, Dr. Joe Muskin, and Prof. Ali Karimoddini — 02:55:51
Talk by Dr. Irene Gregory and Dr. Michael Acheson — 03:28:15
“Omnidirectional Multirotor Drones” — Hyungyu Lee — 00:21:17
“Shared Autonomy: From Robots to AI Agents” — Sandeep Banik — 00:35:20
“A Robust Task-Level Control Architecture for Learned Dynamical Systems” — Eshika Pathak — 00:50:03
Robotics Demos — 01:02:25
“3D Semantic Scene Graph Pipeline for Certifiable UAV Autonomy” — Sighant Jha — 01:12:55
Photo Gallery
Highlights from the NASA ULI Annual Review 2026, featuring technical presentations, discussions, outreach activities, and poster sessions.
