Dr Francesco Topputo is an Associate Professor of Aerospace Systems at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and holds a position as Visiting Researcher at TU Delft, The Netherlands. His core research activities involve space flight dynamics and control, autonomous navigation, interplanetary CubeSat mission and system design. He has been PI in 8 research projects, and leads a research group composed by 1 PostDoc, 5 PhD students, 1 Research Assistant, and 5 visiting PhD students. He has co-founded Dinamica Srl, an Italian SME engaged in multiple activities with ESA and EC, where he has been partner for 10 years. He has authored 40 peer-reviewed articles published in international journals and over 160 works in total. He is Associated Editor at the journals Advances in Space Research (Elsevier) and Astrodynamics (Springer).
Areas of expertise
- Highly nonlinear astrodynamics
- Optimal control theory
- Autonomous interplanetary CubeSats
- Multiphysics modeling, simulation and optimization
- Numerical methods for astrodynamics