Contact Professor Antonios Tsourdos

Areas of expertise

  • Aeronautical Systems
  • Autonomous Systems
  • Instrumentation, Sensors and Measurement Science
  • Mechatronics & Advanced Controls
  • Space Systems
  • Systems Engineering

Background

Antonios Tsourdos obtained an MEng on Electronic, Control and Systems Engineering from the University of Sheffield (1995), an MSc on Systems Engineering from Cardiff University (1996) and a PhD on Nonlinear Robust Flight Control Design and Analysis from Cranfield University (1999).

He is a Professor of Autonomous Systems and Control with Cranfield University. He was appointed Head of the Autonomous Systems Group, Cranfield Defence and Security in 2007, Head of the Centre of Autonomous and Cyber-Physical Systems, School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing in 2012 and Director of Research - Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing in 2015.

Professor Tsourdos was member of the Team Stellar, the winning team for the UK MoD Grand Challenge (2008) and the IET Innovation Award (Category Team, 2009). He was member of the BSI Future Flight Standards Hub (2023-2024) and the AIAA Advanced Aerial Mobility Certification Task Force (2023-2024).

Professor Tsourdos is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, he has served (2017-2023) as chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Aerospace Control.

He is editorial board member for:

* Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part G: Journal of Aerospace Engineering,

* Aerospace Science and Technology

* International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences,

* Scientific Reports - Nature

* Control Engineering Practice,

* International Journal of Systems Science

* Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems.

He has also served in the editorial board member of the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems and the IEEE Transactions of Instrumentation and Measurement.

Professor Tsourdos research is focused on autonomy. He has published widely on guidance, control and navigation for single and multiple autonomous vehicles as well as mission planning and multi-agent systems.

Research opportunities

Antonios research interests include:

- guidance and control of aerial platforms

- position, navigation and timing

- autonomous systems and robotics

- mission planning and task allocation

- path planning and trajectory optimisation

- multi-agent systems

- UAS traffic management

- advanced air mobility

Selected recent research project:

CHEDDAR: Communications Hub For Empowering Distributed ClouD Computing Applications And Research (Ref No EP/X040518/1).

Air Mobility Ecosystem Consortium (Funded by Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund with Ref No 10023201)

Project BLUEPRINT - Developing a Blueprint for Scalable UTM-Enabled BVLOS Drone Operations Across the UK (Funded by Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund with Ref No 10025964)

High intensity Autonomous Drone Operations project (HADO) (Funded by Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund with Ref No 10024815)

Obtain flight mission readiness, enabling rapid intervention for healthcare and critical infrastructure, leveraging all value chain actors and U-Space services (Grant agreement ID: 101114855)

UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node in Security (Ref No EP/V026763/1)

Enabling wide area persistent remote sensing for agriculture applications by developing and coordinating multiple heterogeneous platforms (Ref No ST/N006852/1)

CASCADE (Complex Autonomous aircraft Systems Configuration, Analysis and Design Exploratory). (Ref No EP/R009953/1).

Current activities

Professor Tsourdos leads the research theme of autonomous systems within the School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing at Cranfield University.

He conducts basic and applied research in the fields of guidance, control and navigation for single and multiple unmanned autonomous vehicles, mission planning and decision making of autonomous vehicles, UAS traffic management, as well as research on cyber-physical systems.

His research is funded by UKRI, ESA, Horizon Europe and industry.

Clients

  • BAE Systems PLC
  • Lockheed Martin Corporation
  • Leonardo S.p.A. (Agusta Westland)
  • Boeing Co
  • Airbus SE
  • European Space Agency
  • Thales SA
  • SAAB AB

Publications

Articles In Journals

Conference Papers

Books