Dr Alexandre Pechev

Biography

Alexandre is a Lecturer in Control Engineering at the Space Centre. He holds Masters in Control Engineering and a PhD from Cardiff University where his research was into Robust Linear and Non-linear Control of Magnetically Levitated Systems.

Alexandre has more than a decade of experience in the area of industrial control systems design and embedded control hardware and software design. He started his career in 1993 as an assistant control engineer and he has been working in the Petrochemical and Oil and Gas industries until 1997. He then moved to the UK to pursue for a PhD degree and to work on a contract basis as a control-systems consultant for companies in the UK and Germany. In 2001, he joined Philips Semiconductors, Southampton, where he designed and implemented robust control algorithms for laser positioning and tracking for commercial optical data-storage systems. This has led to several publications and patents. In 2005 he become a Lecturer in the Surrey Space Centre where he researches and teaches in the area of Robotics Control and Spacecraft Guidance, Navigation and Control. Alexandre is a member of the IEEE.

Further details can be found on my personal web page.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the area of robust linear and non-linear control with applications. Some of my current work include:

• Recently I have been interested in the area of Inverse Kinematics. Recent research on spacecraft control has led to the development of a computationally efficient and singularity robust algorithm for Inverse Kinematics. This work applies to the area of robotics control and computer animation. More details are given here.
  
• Singularity avoidance in Control Moment Gyro systems.
  
• Magnetic Levitation Technology and applications. Development of electro-mechanical actuators and active magnetic bearings with fault-tolerant control loops and DSP control hardware for reaction/momentum wheels, laser pointing devices for intersatellite communication, vibration isolation and precise pointing of payloads (3DWheel)
• Application of H-infinity control to spacecraft attitude control. Analysis and dealing with performance limiting factors: plant uncertainties, sampling jitter, power consumption, drifts and wear, structural resonances.
  
• Nonlinear H-infinity Control of multivariable systems with application to industrial systems. Performance analysis and digital implementation.
  
• Robust linear and nonlinear H-infinity filtering and estimation.
  
• Limitation in performance analysis in digital control algorithms. Design of processing cores for embedded control. Actuator fault detection.

Publications