I teach drones to fly on their own.

I'm Krishna Muvva, and I build drones that fly themselves. My research brings together perception and control, teaching aircraft to see and understand the world and to act on what they see, so they can fly in the places that defeat ordinary autopilots: turbulent air, dense forest, and skies with no GPS signal to lean on.

I work across nearly every kind of flying machine, from multirotors and fixed-wing aircraft to VTOLs and flapping-wing robots. Right now, at the Nevada Center for Applied Research, I'm on a NASA-funded project building UAVs that navigate deep beneath forest canopies, where GPS can't reach, to collect sub-canopy data in support of forest management and wildfire prevention.

I earned my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where my dissertation, "Learn to Fly," received the Folsom Distinguished Dissertation Award. My work has also been recognized with the AIAA Orville and Wilbur Wright Graduate Award, given to a single graduate student worldwide for excellence in aerospace research.