Loughborough University Centre for Control and Autonomous Systems (LUCAS)

Current research profile of the Centre falls into three core directions:

1. Development of autonomous system and control technologies
   Development of advanced algorithms/methods for autonomous vehicles such as autopilot, situation awareness, path planning, and decision making. Focuses are on unmanned aerial vehicles, and intelligent ground vehicles.
   
   
2. Ensuring the safety of autonomous system and control technologies
   Research in this direction includes developing contingence management to enable safe operation of autonomous vehicles,  understanding and mitigating safety risk when embedding AI algorithms on a product and system, or, more importantly, developing new techniques/procedures to support verification and validation of new autonomous functions/systems to provide assurance.
   
   
3. Application of autonomous system and control technologies
   This is an ever-growing research direction, including the applications of artificial intelligence, data mining and autonomous system technologies in a wide range of sectors, from intelligent mobility and defense to agriculture and environment monitoring.

The Centre has strong links with industrial partners and attracts significant research funding from the UK government funding agencies and industry.

The mission of the Centre is to advance control and autonomous systems, increase the levels of automation, and safeguard a wider application of automation and artificial intelligence, driven by the global challenges and the UK priorities. Particularly it aims to integrate fundamental research with real-world challenges and tackle real world challenges to ensure safety of a future highly automated society.