PhD Candidate

Dynamic Systems Control Group

Robert Bosch GmbH, Corporate Research 

Leonardo Cecchin graduated in Automation and Control Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in October 2020, with the thesis “Graph-Based Exploration and Mapping for Mobile Robots”. From November 2020 until June 2021 he has been a Research Fellow at SAS-Lab, working on graph-based approaches for exploration and mapping with autonomous multicopter drones, equipped with positioning systems and LiDAR turrets. Since July 2021 he is carrying out a PhD at Bosch Research, Germany, in the framework of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network “ELO-X”.

Project description

This PhD project consists in the development of an Adaptive Multilayer Model Predictive Controller for electrical drives, in particular the case study will be the electric motor-pump unit of a hydraulic machine. This entails the modeling of the system, both in a highly detailed and a control-oriented version, the study of a novel multilayer approach for the control of the system’s dynamics from the millisecond to minute range, and the extension of the approach towards learning and prediction of slowly varying parameters, working conditions and loads. At the end the controller will be implemented on the real system through an ad-hoc built real-time solver, and its performance will be evaluated with respect to an ideal (real-time infeasible) controller, that will be studied as a benchmark reference, and other alternative solutions.