About Berkeley Drones

Drones have crossed the boundary between specialized tools and essential infrastructure. Low-cost, increasingly autonomous systems are reshaping warfare, bringing routine operations beyond the pilot’s line of sight within reach, and changing how institutions work across medicine, agriculture, infrastructure, disaster response, and environmental science. The decisive capability is no longer the aircraft alone, but the knowledge, institutions, and industrial capacity required to deploy the technology safely and improve it continuously.

Berkeley Drones helps governments and industry partners build that capability as a coherent whole. Each engagement begins with the partner’s objectives, then develops the physical, digital, and organizational foundations needed to achieve them. The result is an ecosystem the partner can operate locally and extend as new technologies and applications emerge.

Our mission is to place advanced autonomous capability under local direction. We pursue that mission in close collaboration with the Center for Applied Drone Research at UC Berkeley. There, faculty and experimental facilities test new ideas in real-world conditions. Berkeley Drones carries the resulting knowledge into infrastructure and operations.

Berkeley Drones is founded and led by faculty from the UC Berkeley School of Engineering, alongside senior practitioners with extensive experience in large-scale systems, infrastructure, and deployment. The founding faculty are internationally recognized researchers whose work has shaped modern approaches to autonomous systems, digital twins, advanced manufacturing, sensing, and multi-vehicle coordination.

Collectively, these leaders have directed decades of federally, state-, and industry-funded research programs, overseen major experimental facilities, and contributed to real-world deployments across aerospace, robotics, energy systems, transportation infrastructure, and national resilience initiatives.