Autonomous Systems & Robotics

HKUST has been a major disruptive force leading research on enabling fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles that can handle complex terrains via pioneering motion control and robotic perceptions technologies. The world’s largest drone producer DJI is founded by a HKUST alumnus.

HKUST researchers across disciplines are working to develop robots with ever more powerful “mind”. HKUST is at the forefront of building machines that can learn, act, and sense emotions like their human creators, with far-reaching applications for the future, such as home and service robots.

Innovative research has been pursued at HKUST to advance intelligent unmanned ground vehicle systems to enable both high-speed and low-speed autonomous driving in diverse environments with multiple sensors fusion. HKUST has developed Hong Kong’s first unmanned passenger vehicle system.

At HKUST, scientists are drawing on new domains such as deep learning and transfer learning to design a new and effective paradigm for industrial manufacturing that lies between complicated universal robots with excessive degrees of freedom, and fixed automation that is hardly reconfigurable and adaptive.

HKUST research teams have been advancing autonomous technologies, from scanning of targeted environments, post-processing of scanned data to generation of BIM models, that could profoundly change the way infrastructure are built, inspected and maintained.