Pedro Lourenço

Pedro Lourenço
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Pedro verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
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Pedro verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
  • PhD
  • Head of Advanced Guidance & Control at GMV

About

39
Publications
3,754
Reads
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184
Citations
Introduction
Head of Guidance & Control Section at the GNC division of the Flight Segment and Robotics business unit of GMV, Lisbon, Portugal. Designing and analysing GNC/AOCS systems for spacecraft in ESA-contracted activities for addressing rendezvous and docking, the Lagrange telescope mission phases A/B1, reusable end-to-end space transportation systems, reusable launch vehicles, among other applications. Leading R&D&I efforts towards the adoption of optimization G&C, with emphasis on the V&V process.
Current institution
GMV
Current position
  • Head of Advanced Guidance & Control
Additional affiliations
October 2011 - June 2018
Institute for Systems and Robotics
Position
  • Researcher
Description
  • Development of localization algorithms for autonomous vehicles: - Vision-based 3-D Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM); - SLAM with acoustic/EM beacons; - Monocular/bearing-only SLAM; Worked towards my PhD with a thesis titled "Globally Convergent Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: Design Techniques, Analysis, and Implementation" from January 2013 to January 2018 (with defense in 2019). Developed my masters thesis in the same field.
July 2011 - August 2011
AENA
Position
  • Intern
Description
  • - Involvement on the preliminary stages of the implementation of the airport services management system SGESER; - Evaluation of the airport situation in terms of IATA's levels of reference regarding airport services; - Statistic data recollection, treatment and analysis, as well as creation of predicting models regarding the bus parking traffic.
September 2007 - December 2018
PFML
Position
  • Consultant
Description
  • - Management of the Production Part Approval Processes to several new automotive projects in the company, handling and generating statistical and operational data. - Development of the Quality Management System to achieve ISO9001:2015 certification. - Design of software applications to manage the day-to-day of the manufacturing operations, as well as instititutional obligations to state agencies (Python, MS Access, SQL). - Management and implementation of all the IT solutions used in the company
Education
January 2013 - January 2019
Instituto Superior Técnico
Field of study
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering
September 2010 - November 2012
Instituto Superior Técnico
Field of study
  • Aerospace Engineering
September 2007 - July 2010
Instituto Superior Técnico
Field of study
  • Aerospace Engineering

Publications

Publications (39)
Conference Paper
Recent spacecraft mission concepts propose larger payloads that have lighter, less rigid structures. For large lightweight structures, the natural frequencies of their vibration modes may fall within the attitude controller bandwidth, threatening the stability and settling time of the controller and compromising performance. This work tackles this...
Preprint
Recent spacecraft mission concepts propose larger payloads that have lighter, less rigid structures. For large lightweight structures, the natural frequencies of their vibration modes may fall within the attitude controller bandwidth, threatening the stability and settling time of the controller and compromising performance. This work tackles this...
Article
Rendezvous with uncooperative targets, such as space debris, inoperative satellites, and asteroids requires flight synchronization between the chaser spacecraft and the target. Therefore, the relative attitude and position, as well as the relative angular and linear velocities need to be estimated using relative navigation sensors, such as cameras...
Article
Full-text available
This paper delves into a rendezvous scenario involving a chaser and a target spacecraft, focusing on the application of Model Predictive Control (MPC) to design a controller capable of guiding the chaser toward the target. The operational principle of spacecraft thrusters, requiring a minimum activation time that leads to the existence of a control...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
IOANT is an ongoing activity supported by the European Space Agency aimed at the development of a versatile autonomous Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) system for in-orbit assembly (IOA) of large antennas. The target is to advance the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of key GNC technologies to 4. To reach this, the activity is structured into...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Fault tolerant control for a cluster of engines in launchers has re-gained attention in recent times thanks to the development of capabilities of new reusable launchers such as SpaceX Falcon 9 and Starship. Most mission failures in the last quarter of the century were caused by propulsion or TVC failures. The former involve an off-nominal thrust de...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
VV4RTOS is an activity supported by the European Space Agency aimed at the development and validation of a framework for the verification and validation of spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) systems based on embedded optimisation, tailored to handle different layers of abstraction, from guidance and control (G&C) requirements down t...
Conference Paper
VV4RTOS is an activity supported by the European Space Agency aimed at the development and validation of a framework for the verification and validation of spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) systems based on embedded optimisation, tailored to handle different layers of abstraction, from guidance and control (G&C) requirements down t...
Conference Paper
This paper presents the design of attitude control systems for autonomous spacecraft subject to noisy measurements from sensors, external, and internal disturbances. The objective is to perform slew manoeuvres and maintain pointing stability while guaranteeing fast convergence and high performance. For slew manoeuvres, a Nonlinear Model Predictive...
Conference Paper
This paper addresses two complementary problems of spacecraft formation flying, namely spacecraft platooning and on-orbit spacecraft servicing, using Model Predictive Control (MPC). With the proposed solutions, these space formation scenarios can be regarded as a cooperative system composed of several spacecraft with a common goal, which may have c...
Chapter
This paper presents the design of attitude control systems for autonomous spacecraft subject to noisy measurements from sensors, external, and internal disturbances. The objective is to perform slew manoeuvres and maintain pointing stability while guaranteeing fast convergence and high performance. For slew manoeuvres, a Nonlinear Model Predictive...
Article
This paper presents a Distributed Model Predictive Control (DMPC) algorithm for a scenario of spacecraft formation flying, namely spacecraft platooning in a leader-follower formation. This spacecraft formation application can be regarded as a cooperative system composed of several spacecraft with a common goal, for which a relative translational mo...
Preprint
Full-text available
We introduce a closed-form method for identification of discrete-time linear time-variant systems from data, formulating the learning problem as a regularized least squares problem where the regularizer favors smooth solutions within a trajectory. We develop a closed-form algorithm with guarantees of optimality and with a complexity that increases...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Embedded on-board-optimization-based guidance is a set of guidance schemes that provide spacecraft the capability to plan and perform trajectories under several constraints autonomously. This autonomy will allow the space vehicle to more efficiently perform more challenging goals while dealing with rapidly changing environments, unmodelled/unforese...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In the past decade, GMV has been, both as a participant and a reviewer, at the forefront of ESA’s efforts in identifying and responding to criticalities in GNC technologies for future ADR and in-orbit servicing missions. This paper provides an anthology of the recent developments - the state of the art of ADR mission design from a GNC perspective,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
GUIBEAR is an on-going activity supported by the European Space Agency aimed at the demonstration of the feasibility of bearings-only (B-O) far-range rendezvous in near rectilinear Halo orbits (NROs). The studied scenario is the far-range rendezvous of the HERACLES Lunar Ascent Element (LAE) with the Lunar Orbital Platform – Gateway (LOP-G) that is...
Article
This paper addresses the problem of obtaining an Earth-fixed trajectory and map (ETM), with the associated uncertainty, using the sensor-based map provided by a globally asymptotically/exponentially stable (GES) SLAM filter. The algorithm builds on an optimization problem with a closed-form solution, and its uncertainty description is derived resor...
Article
This paper addresses the problem of minimizing the uncertainty through motion planning in a globally exponentially stable sensor-based simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm, with the objective of performing active exploitation. This is done by designing an optimization problem that weighs the final uncertainty, the overall uncertainty in...
Article
This paper proposes a novel filter for sensor-based bearing-only simultaneous localization and mapping in three dimensions with globally exponentially stable (GES) error dynamics. A nonlinear system is designed, its output transformed, and its dynamics augmented so that the proposed formulation can be considered as linear time-varying for the purpo...
Chapter
This chapter presents an overview of algorithms deeply rooted in a sensor-based approach to the SLAM problem that provide global convergence guarantees and allow for the use of partially observable landmarks. The presented algorithms address the more usual range-and-bearing SLAM problem, either in 2-D using a LiDAR or in 3-D using an RGB-D camera ,...
Article
Full-text available
This paper addresses the weighted orthogonal Procrustes problem of matching stochastically perturbed point clouds, formulated as an optimization problem with a closed-form solution. A novel uncertainty characterization of the solution of this problem is proposed resorting to perturbation theory concepts, which admits arbitrary transformations betwe...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents the design, analysis, and experimental validation of a globally asymptotically stable (GAS) filter for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with application to unmanned aerial vehicles. The main contributions of this paper are the results of global convergence and stability for SLAM in tridimensional (3-D) environments....
Poster
Full-text available
This work proposes novel techniques that can be applied to simultaneous localization and mapping in order to bypass the inherent nonlinearity of the problem and, ultimately, to design novel globally convergent filters. Algorithms for range-bearing, range-only and bearing-only frameworks are analysed and implemented with success in experimental sett...
Conference Paper
This paper proposes a novel filter for sensor-based bearing-only simultaneous localization and mapping in three dimensions with globally exponentially stable (GES) error dynamics. A nonlinear system is designed, its output transformed, and its dynamics augmented so that the proposed formulation can be considered as linear time-varying for the purpo...
Conference Paper
This paper presents the design, analysis, and validation of a globally exponentially stable (GES) filter for tridimensional (3-D) range-only simultaneous localization and mapping in sensor networks with moving object tracking. For observability analysis purposes, two nonlinear sensor-based dynamic systems are formulated resorting only to exact line...
Article
This paper proposes the design, analysis, and validation of a globally exponentially stable (GES) filter for tridimensional (3-D) range-only simultaneous localization and mapping. For observability analysis purposes, a nonlinear sensor-based dynamical system is formulated resorting only to exact linear and angular kinematics and a state augmentatio...
Conference Paper
This paper addresses the problem of obtaining an inertial trajectory and map, with the associated uncertainty, using the sensor-based map provided by a globally asymptotically stable SLAM filter. An optimization problem with a closed-form solution is formulated, and its uncertainty description is derived resorting to perturbation theory. The combin...
Conference Paper
This paper presents the design, analysis, performance evaluation, and preliminary experimental validation of a globally asymptotically stable (GAS) filter for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with application to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The SLAM problem is formulated in a sensor-based framework and modified in such a way that th...
Conference Paper
Localization using the received signal strength indication (RSSI) of wireless local area networks with a priori knowledge of the coordinates of the routers/access points is addressed in this paper. The proposed algorithm employs a path loss model that allows for the inclusion of the logarithmic measurements of the signal strength directly in the st...

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