Invited Speakers

Behçet Açıkmeşe is a professor in the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Washington, Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University. He was a senior technologist at JPL and a lecturer at Caltech. At JPL, he developed control algorithms for planetary landing, spacecraft formation flying, and asteroid and comet sample return missions. He developed the “flyaway” control algorithms in Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission and the RCS algorithms for NASA SMAP mission. Dr. A¸cıkme¸se invented a novel real-time convex optimization based planetary landing guidance algorithm (G-FOLD) that was flight tested by JPL, which is the first demonstration of a real-time optimization algorithm for rocket guidance. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, IEEE Technical Excellence in Aerospace Controls, numerous NASA Achievement awards for his contributions to NASA missions and technology development. He is an Associate Fellow of AIAA, a Senior Member of IEEE, and an associate editor of IEEE Control System Magazine and AIAA JGCD.

Chen Shuzhao is the chief guidance and control engineer of LinkSpace. He obtained his master's degree from Kunming University of Science and Technology, majoring in physics, and has outstanding performance in mathematics. At the same time, he studied control theory related courses in college.

He joined LinkSpace after graduation to study the guidance and control of reusable rockets. Three months later, he independently proposed a neural network control method based on state prediction to control objects with rough mathematical models. This method played a key role in LinkSpace 's realization of rocket recovery and was published in Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica (EI). As a result, LinkSpace realized the hover and recovery of the RLV-T3 rocket in early 2018, and the RLV-T5 rocket in early 2019. After the method was upgraded, the 300-meter flight recovery test of the RLV-T5 rocket was realized in August 2019. This guidence method will be applied to the recovery of RLV according to actual conditions in the future. At the same time, this method can be applied to many fields and has great application value.

Chen Shuzhao's recent research topic is the flight planning of aircraft, especially the rocket's launch and recovery. He is working in-depth with another oganization from China, and will have a recovery test with the propellant-optimization planning method through a first stage of a rocket which has the same size as CZ-3 in 2021.

Dr. Andrés Marcos received his Aerospace Engineering B.Sc. from St. Louis University (USA) in 1997, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in 2000 and 2004 respectively from the University of Minnesota (USA) in the group of prof. Gary Balas. During his career he has been principal investigator for over 22 projects / 17M€ funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Commission (EU-FP7/H2020 programs) and the UK Space Agency (UKSA) related to re-entry vehicles, launchers, satellites, aircraft, and UAVs. The results of his research and development activities have been published in over 140 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications, and together with his team he has flight tested robust control controllers and fault detection and isolation filters in: aircraft (DLR’s ATTAS and JAXA’s MuPAL-alpha), autonomous Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicles (DLR’s EAGLE), and NDUT’s small solid test rocket.

Dr. Marcos professional career reflects his personal understanding that it is necessary to have both, academic scholarship and industrial experience, in order to acquire a comprehensive engineering understanding. From 2004 to 2006, he was a post-doctoral associate in the group of prof. Ian Postlethwaite at the University of Leicester (UK) working in a Group for Aeronautical Research and Technology in Europe (GARTEUR) project related to nonlinear flight control clearance. From 2006 to August 2013 he worked at Deimos-Space S.L.U. (Spain) as lead R&D control engineer for ESA and EU projects. During this time, he was main proposer and coordinator of two aeronautics EU-FP7 projects, ADDSAFE and RECONFIGURE, dedicated to the transfer of fault detection, isolation and reconfiguration methods to the aircraft industry. From October 2013 to August 2020, he was with the Aerospace Engineering department at the University of Bristol (UK) as Senior Lecturer where he led the aerospace control activities. During this time he graduated 3 PhDs (all recognized with merits and awards), published over 25 journals, gave 35 invited seminars around the World, and was awarded projects for over 1.8Meuros.

In August 2020, he founded and became director of a Small-Medium-Enterprise specialized in research and development for aerospace control projects: Technology for Aerospace Control Ltd., http://www.tasc-group.com/. TASC focuses on helping reduce the gap between theory and practice, and acts as a bridge between research organizations and industry.

As a professor at ISAS and of the graduate school of University of Tokyo, he has been conducting many of research programs for space science and technology such as hypersonic aerodynamics, new transportation systems, planetary entry, and so on, since 1980th. Besides these basic researches necessary for the future vehicle systems and missions, he has been joining, creating and conducting many of space programs at ISAS, such as rocket development, flight experiments and space science missions.

Among many achievements, he has been active about reusable space transportation system. Not only doing system studies, but carrying out flight demonstration of winged space vehicle and vertical landing vehicles for reusable space transportation systems. Vision for the future vehicles were pursued by him as a studies of space tourism, which is shedding the light toward the future of rocketry. Another highlight is a sample and return mission from asteroids. A returning capsule of the first Hayabusa mission was developed and made successful flight for the first time in the world by his team.

After finishing executive position at ISAS, he is now active for stimulating the commercial sector activities such as promotion and new market development of passenger carrier of space tour and P2P (point-to-point) highspeed transport as it is done in the civil aviation today. These are based on the works done by above-mentioned research carriers and activities of him.

Marco Sagliano is since 2018 Visiting GNC Specialist at the Space Transportation Systems Research Unit of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in Chofu, (Tokyo, Japan), in the frame of the trilateral cooperation CALLISTO (Cooperative Action Leading to Launchers Innovation in Stage Tossback Operations) jointly developed by DLR, JAXA and CNES.

Marco Sagliano was born in Naples, Italy, where he also received his Bachelor’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering in 2005 and his Master’s Degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering in 2008.

From 2008 to 2011 he worked as GNC System Engineer at GMV Defense and Space, Madrid, Spain, and since 2011 he is Research Engineer in the GNC department of the DLR’s Institute of Space Systems, in Bremen, Germany. In 2016 he earned a PhD at the University of Bremen in cooperation with TU Delft.

His technical interests include pseudospectral methods, convex optimization, robust and nonlinear control.

Jaemyung Ahn is an Associate Professor of aerospace engineering with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea.

He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in aerospace engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea, in 1997 and 1999, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, he worked for Bain & Company as a management consultant helping strategic decisions of clients in various industrial fields. He also worked for the Korea Aerospace Research Institute from 1999 to 2004 and was involved in the research and development of the first liquid propellant rocket and launch vehicle of South Korea as a System Engineer.

Currently he is leading the strategic Aerospace Initiative research group. His research interests include flight dynamics and control and design optimization of complex systems - with primary applications in aerospace systems.

Chang-Hun Lee received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), in 2008, 2010, and 2013, respectively.

From 2013 to 2015, he was a Senior Researcher for Guidance and Control (G&C) Team, Agency for Defense Development(ADD), Daejeon, Korea. From 2016 to 2018, he was a Research Fellow for School of Aerospace, Transportation, and Manufacturing, Cranfield University, Bedford, United Kingdom. Since 2019, he has been with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. His recent research interests include advanced missile guidance and control, computational guidance and control, cooperative control for unmanned aerial vehicles, target tracking filter, deep learning, and aviation data analytics. Currently, he is associate editor of International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Science.