Personal Portfolio
Aerospace Engineer
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Aerospace Engineer · GNC · Space Robotics
I build machines that fly, orbit, and explore — working where physics meets software. My focus is guidance, navigation & control (GNC) and space robotics: modeling, designing, and validating the control and estimation systems behind them, from ground-effect vehicles to free-floating platforms.
I'm currently a Research Specialist with the Space Robotics Research Group (SpaceR) at the University of Luxembourg, where my research covers classical control, robot learning and reinforcement learning for autonomous space systems. The aim: push what autonomous robots can do beyond Earth.
Publications, honors, and courses
Published work, honors, and courses that round out the engineering toolkit.
Aerospace & space engineering — Lisbon and Rome
Aerospace and space engineering — from the fundamentals of aerodynamics, structures, and propulsion to guidance, navigation & control.
My master's thesis built an air-bearing testbed for spacecraft attitude control: an active mass-balancing system with three sliding masses that cancels residual gravitational torque, recreating a near frictionless, torque-free space-like environment. A PID controller and an extended Kalman filter (EKF) estimate and correct the platform's centre of mass, validated in both simulation and experiment.
Control, robotics, and the tools behind them
From control theory to CAD to code — the toolkit behind the work.
Each moon is a role
Roles across space robotics, GNC, and control. Click a moon for the details of each position.
Space Robotics Research Group (SpaceR), University of Luxembourg · Luxembourg
Research on autonomous robotic systems, where GPU-accelerated simulation is a common thread. Simulating thousands of environments in parallel is what makes modern control tractable: sampling-based methods like MPPI need the throughput, and learning methods need either that volume of experience or a differentiable model to backpropagate through. I build those simulators and the controllers that run on them.
The applications span free-floating spacecraft for on-orbit servicing, wing-in-ground vehicles, and more recently, robotic manipulation. Whatever the platform, the goal is the same: policies that survive the move from simulation to hardware to space.
Trisolaris Advanced Technologies · Lisbon, Portugal
Responsible for GNC and systems engineering on two EU-funded wing-in-ground (WIG) vehicle programmes — AIRSHIP, a fully electric transport vehicle for inter-island routes, and SEAWINGS, a surveillance UAV for defence (see Projects). Both fly within a wingspan of the water to exploit the ground effect, trading altitude for speed and energy efficiency.
Each moon is a project — one has its own spacecraft
Selected work where physics meets software. Click a moon to open a project.
Autonomous, zero-emission wing-in-ground vehicle
A Horizon Europe project developing a new class of fully electric unmanned WIG vehicle (UWV) for inter-island and inland-waters transport. Flying within a wingspan of the surface lets the vehicle ride the ground effect — the cushion of high-pressure air trapped between wing and water — which buys it the speed of an aircraft at a fraction of the energy, with no direct emissions and far less noise.
I have worked on AIRSHIP across both consortium partners: at Trisolaris on integration and systems engineering for the vehicle itself, and now at SpaceR on control systems and simulation — a high-fidelity aerodynamic framework for flight control, built to capture ground effect faithfully enough that controllers tuned in it transfer to the real vehicle.
Wing-in-ground surveillance UAV for the sea/air interface
A European Defence Fund project developing a new class of autonomous surveillance drone operating at the sea/air interface. Skimming the surface in ground effect gives the vehicle long range, high payload and a low radar signature at low cost — a combination that suits intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance (ISR), search and rescue, and logistics missions.
I was responsible for secure communications and the mission-management interface — the link between operator and vehicle, and the assurance that nobody else could use it.
MSc THESIS · 2021–2022 · Grade 19/20
Testing a satellite's attitude control on the ground is hard: gravity dominates, and any offset between the platform's centre of rotation and its centre of mass produces a torque that swamps the effects you're trying to measure. An air-bearing platform removes friction, but not that residual torque.
This thesis built a testbed that cancels it. Three sliding masses actively shift the centre of mass onto the centre of rotation, recreating a near-frictionless, torque-free environment in which spacecraft attitude control can be tested realistically. A PID controller drives the masses, and an extended Kalman filter estimates the offset online and feeds it back.
Three-DoF air-bearing spacecraft emulator
A pneumatic free-floating platform that rides frictionlessly on air bearings across the floor of SpaceR's Zero-G Lab, reproducing in three degrees of freedom the planar dynamics a spacecraft experiences in orbit. Eight nozzles and a reaction wheel stand in for a satellite's actuators, and a motion capture system tracks every run as ground truth.
It's where on-orbit servicing research meets hardware: policies trained in simulation have to survive real actuators, sensor noise and delays. I work on the platform and the autonomy that runs on it — docking and fuel-transfer-ready alignment — a natural fit for constrained RL and sampling-based predictive control.
© 2026 Pedro Lima