Yaokun Lu

Yaokun Lu

卢耀坤 · Ph.D. Student

I am a Ph.D. student at Beihang University (BUAA), advised by Prof. Lei Guo (Academician, CAS) and Prof. Jianzhong Qiao. My research is about giving small fixed-wing UAVs the autonomy to see and track things on the ground: I plan the aircraft's flight and its camera-gimbal motion together so a target stays in frame, and work on disturbance-rejection control and vision-based autonomous landing.

Before my Ph.D. I spent three years as a senior algorithm engineer at DiDi Chuxing (order dispatching, ETA prediction, large-scale online decision models), then a year as a research assistant at Zhejiang University's Huzhou Institute with Prof. Fei Gao, working on autonomous flight and trajectory planning. I also founded a UAV company that delivered an aerial-survey crop-management system to a provincial customer, and interned on the flight-control team at DJI (BSP / HAL development, core repository access). M.S. (2019) and B.S. (2016) from UESTC. National champion, ROBOCON 2015.

Open to full-time positions starting July 2027 — flight control, gimbal / line-of-sight stabilization, motion planning & control.

✉ Email 💻 GitHub

📰 News

🧭 Research

Gimbal-in-the-loop observation planning

Plan the aircraft trajectory and the camera-gimbal pointing at the same time, so a ground target stays inside the field of view while the plane keeps flying.

Fixed-wing UAV autonomy

Trajectory generation and control for small fixed-wing drones — smooth, feasible flight paths under real aerodynamic and turn-rate limits.

Disturbance-rejection control

Estimating and cancelling disturbances (wind, coupling, actuator errors) so the vehicle and the pod point where they should.

Vision-based autonomous landing

Letting a fixed-wing aircraft recognise its own takeoff strip and land itself back visually — teach-and-repeat homing.

📚 Publications

TMECH

Refined Disturbance Utilization-Based Green Control for Spacecraft with Composite Actuator Disturbances

H. Teng, Y. Lu, P. Xia, J. Qiao, L. Guo

IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2025 Accepted

DOI

ICGNC

Composite Disturbance Separation and Utilization-Based Maneuver Control for Spacecrafts with Reaction Wheel Errors

H. Teng, Y. Lu, J. Qiao, L. Guo

Int. Conf. on Guidance, Navigation and Control (ICGNC), Springer, 2024

2026

Four first-author manuscripts on multi-stage pointing control and gimbal observation planning

Y. Lu, J. Qiao, L. Guo, et al.

IEEE Trans. Aerospace and Electronic Systems Under review  ·  IEEE Trans. Circuits and Systems II Submitted  ·  Chinese Journal of Aeronautics Submitted  ·  ICCA 2026 Accepted

📝 Patents

Software copyright: multi-stage loop simulation platform for airborne electro-optical tracking systems.

🚁 Hardware Platforms

Aircraft I build, instrument and fly — fixed-wing VTOL, multirotor carriers, and the electro-optical gimbals they carry. Everything below is flight hardware, not renders.

Three UAV platforms in the lab
Test fleet. Left to right: gimballed quadrotor, fixed-wing VTOL with a nose-mounted electro-optical pod, and a heavy-lift hexacopter carrying a gimbal and LiDAR.
Fixed-wing VTOL with electro-optical pod
Fixed-wing VTOL. Tilt/lift-rotor quad-plane with a two-axis gimbal under the nose — the airframe behind the gimbal-in-the-loop observation planning work.
Heavy-lift hexacopter with gimbal and LiDAR
Heavy-lift hexacopter. Carrier for larger pods and a LiDAR unit; used as a stable platform for pointing and stabilization tests.
Quadrotor with electro-optical gimbal
Gimballed quadrotor. Compact carrier for line-of-sight stabilization and target-tracking experiments.