Leonardo Pedroso, Aerospace Engineering student at Instituto Superior Técnico, was awarded the ‘APCA Master’s Dissertation Award 2024’ by the Portuguese Automatic Control Association (APCA). This distinction is awarded biennially by APCA to the best Master Thesis in Automatic Control and related scientific areas.

“It is a great honor to see my Master Thesis recognized,” shares the student, now pursuing a PhD at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The winning work is entitled “Decentralized and distributed control of large-scale systems with application to mega-constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit” and led the alumnus to develop control algorithms for networks of large-scale systems, which were numerically validated with position control of a mega-constellation of satellites.

The thesis was supervised by Pedro Batista, professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with the work being carried out at the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisbon) and being part of the context of the DECENTER project (Advanced Decentralized Control and Estimation with application to Navigation of Autonomous Vehicles and Traffic Network Management) from the Foundation for Science and Technology.

Projects submitted for consideration under this APCA award are evaluated in three areas: suitability of the theme, scientific and technical quality of the work and innovation.