Having a Ph.D. on controlling Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

His education and work experience is an excellent fit for the job to be done: he has his Ph.D. from NTNU within cybernetics on ”Nonlinear Control of Fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles”.

Suits perfect!

-Yes, I realize that my work at Kitemill is a perfect fit for me. In the Kitemill job, I can utilize all I have learned and worked with before. I am looking forward to the tasks. Kitemill has already achieved a lot of progress in its technological development. Now I will do my best so that we can operate the kites autonomously in a spiral pattern over longer production periods, together with having robust control and autonomous vertical start and landing (VTOL), says Espen Oland.

Drones and space technology

He is born and he grew up in Grimstad. He comes from the research institute Teknova, where he has worked with condition monitoring and autonomous systems. In addition, he is an associate professor at the University of Tromsø (UiT) where he teaches mathematical modelling and simulation of drones. He had also a research period at the Ohio State University in the USA, where he worked under Professor Andrea Serrani and developed a control system for flapping wing micro air vehicles. Additionally, Dr. Oland has a master degree in space technology and several years of experience in construction of satellites through the HiNCube project – both with project management and development of control systems. He has a broad system-level experience with control systems for planes, drones and satellites.

-The goal is that we as soon as possible get a robust control system for the kites, so that they can operate autonomously, says Espen Oland.