Bio

Justin Bradley is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at North Carolina State University. Previously he was a Richard L. and Carol S. McNeel Associate Professor of Computing in the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He holds a B.S. in computer engineering (2005) and M.S. in electrical engineering (2007) from Brigham Young University, and M.S. (2012) and Ph.D. (2014) degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan. He has worked with Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) since 2005, starting at the Multi-AGent Intelligent Coordination and Control (MAGICC) lab at BYU, the A2Sys lab at the University of Michigan, and most recently as a co-director of the Nebraska Intelligent MoBile Unmanned System (NIMBUS) lab since 2015. He is a recipient of a 2021 NSF CAREER award and is an AIAA Associate Fellow. Justin’s research is focused on cyber-physical systems particularly as it relates to control, autonomy, software, and computing for aerospace vehicles. A common theme in his research is developing algorithms that can dynamically adjust their resource utilization in response to uncertainty, adjusting performance as needed to meet demands. To ensure safe, reliable, robust systems he also studies autonomy software, how it evolves, and how to test it to validate performance of complex systems.

Area(s) of Expertise

Robotics
Autonomy
Control
Cyber-Physical Systems
Embedded and Real-Time Systems

Publications

• Online Decision Making for UAVs via Receding Horizon MDP and POMDPs , (2026)
• Robust Safety Assurance for Robotic Swarms Using Decentralized Collision Verification , IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (2026)
• Co-Regulated Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Uncrewed Aircraft System Swarms , 2025 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON UNMANNED AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS, ICUAS (2025)
• Analytics for Real-Time Inertial Localization of the Tethered Aircraft Unmanned System , Experimental Robotics (2024)
• Carving Out Control Code: Automated Identification of Control Software in Autopilot Systems , ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (2024)
• Consensus-Enabled Active Learning for Multi-Agent Systems in Ground Classification of Wetlands , Journal of Aerospace Information Systems (2024)
• A Closed Loop Perception Subsystem for small Unmanned Aerial Systems , AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum (2023)
• GPS-Denied State Estimation for Blue/NDAA Unmanned Multi-Rotor Vehicles , AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum (2023)
• Impact and Influence of Cyber-Physical Systems Research on Autonomous Aerospace Systems , AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum (2023)
• Link Budgeting and Interference Management for UAV Networks in 5G and Beyond , Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing (2023)

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