Driven by socio-economic development and the rapid advancement of science and technology, Intelligent Unmanned Systems (IUS)—including autonomous vehicles, UAV swarms, and embodied intelligence—have moved to the forefront of modern engineering. While their "intelligence" is evolving rapidly, ensuring mission-level reliability and operational efficiency in dynamic environments remains a critical bottleneck.
This keynote speech introduces recent research progress in this fast-growing domain, focusing on the transition from traditional failure-centric models to trustworthy autonomy across four core research directions:
The ability to guarantee reliability is the cornerstone for trustworthy autonomy. This talk will also highlight recent research breakthroughs from my lab in these directions.
Director of the Institute for Quality & Reliability
Full Professor of Department of Industrial Engineering
Tsinghua University
Dr. Yan-Fu Li is currently the Director of the Institute for Quality & Reliability and a full professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering in Tsinghua University, China. From 2011 to 2016, he was a faculty member at CentraleSupélec in Université Paris-Saclay, France. His research areas mainly include system reliability and PHM with the applications onto various complex engineering systems. Dr. Li has published over 120 peer-reviewed high quality research papers on top-tier journals including IEEE Transactions series, UTD-24 journals, IISE Transactions, RESS. His research impact has been recognized through consecutive inclusions in Stanford University's World's Top 2% Most-Cited Scientists list (2021-2025), including both annual and career-long citation impact rankings in 2024-2025. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of several government projects including 2 key projects by NSFC and one by Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE). He is also experienced in industrial research, the long-term partners include the top enterprises such as Huawei, China Southern Power Grid, etc. He has won multiple national society and international society search/paper awards. He holds Associate Editor positions at three prestigious journals: IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, Reliability Engineering & System Safety, and IEEE Transactions on Reliability (2017-2024). He has delivered keynote speeches at major international reliability conferences including ESREL, ICRMS and APARM. He is a vice president of China Inspection and Testing Society. He is elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), an Associate Academician of International Academy of Quality (IAQ) and a Fellow of International Society of Engineering Asset Management (ISEAM).
