Professor Burlion’s research interests are in the area of nonlinear control of autonomous systems. His aim is to enlarge their operating envelope and to prove that they work properly.

Professor Burlion joined the Rutgers faculty in 2019. He’s the director of a new drone laboratory that aims to implement advanced control solutions on fixed wing and rotary wing drones. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Orsay - Paris Sud within the L2S-CNRS in 2007. He was an expert in guidance and control at the French MoD between 2003 and 2010. He was a research scientist at the French Aerospace Lab (ONERA) between 2010 and 2018. He has made a long-term visit at the University of Michigan in 2017-2018.

Big Picture: Designing solutions to safely push controlled systems to their limits.

Focus: Developing advanced methodologies for modeling and controlling autonomous systems in presence of nonlinear dynamics, uncertainties, state constraints or input control saturation.

Industry Collaborators: Between 2003 and 2018, frequent collaborations with the Defense and Civil European Aerospace Industry including:

• Dassault: design of innovative saturated nonlinear control law for a fighter aircraft.
• ESA (European Space Agency): design of a backup autonomous landing solution for a lunar lander based on low cost and bioinspired optic flow sensors.
• CNES (French Space Agency): model and design of attitude control techniques to mitigate the destabilizing effect of propellant sloshing onboard observation satellites.
• AIRBUS: design of innovative control solutions for gust load alleviation, vision based control or flight envelope protection.

Select Accomplishments

• Leader of the VISIOLAND project (VISIOn based control solutions for automatic LANDing of aircraft or fixed wing drones) in close collaboration with AIRBUS, and four academic or industrial partners. The project led to one US patent, several journal publications and the industrialization of the solutions.
• Member of the IFAC technical committee on Aerospace.
• Member of IEEE-CSS Technical Committee on Aerospace Controls.
• Most of his former Ph.D. students were awarded and are now control engineers in Airbus Group.