Dr Marko Jankovic is a space robotics researcher and project leader of two EU Horizons 2020 projects dedicated to the development of solutions for active debris removal and on-orbit servicing at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), namely the PERASPERA In-Orbit Demonstration (PERIOD) and Stardust Reloaded (Stardust-R). From 2013 till 2017 he was a holder of a prestigious Marie Curie Research Fellowship, as part of the EU funded project Stardust where he got the opportunity to be trained by research to develop and master techniques for asteroid and space debris monitoring, removal/deflection and exploitation. The fellowship allowed him to be a visiting researcher at the Astronautics  Research Group of the University of Southampton in 2016 and at the ESA/ESTEC’s Advanced Concepts Team in 2015 where he was challenged to apply his knowledge and think outside the box.
His academic background consists of a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Bremen, M.Sc. in Astronautical Engineering at the Sapienza University of Rome and B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Bologna. He is a member of the IAA Committee on Space Debris since 2018 and of the IAF Technical Committee on Space Traffic Management since 2020.

Areas of expertise:

  • space debris
  • active debris removal
  • multi-body dynamics
  • mission analysis and design
  • motion planning
  • orbital robotics
  • nonlinear optimization
  • knowledge organization systems (i.e. taxonomy, ontology)