In this talk, we review recent and ongoing research at the University of Porto with application to Airborne Wind Energy (AWE). First, we describe the development of a circular take-off and landing framework for tethered airplanes. In particular, we develop an automatic control system for circular take-off and landing of a self-propelled, fixed-wing, tethered aircraft. The aim is to include the framework in an AWE system. Then, we discuss the motion on the surface of a sphere characterized by circle primitives and present a path-following control method for the circle primitive reference paths. Finally, we address the layout optimization problem of AWE farms and its solution methods.

Fernando A.C.C. Fontes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP) and Senior Researcher in the SYSTEC-ARISE research centre. In SYSTEC-ARISE, he coordinates the thematic lines SYSTEC-Control and the ARISE-Intelligent Systems and Robotics. He received his first degree and the Habilitation degree (Agregação) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Porto, the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees from Imperial College London, U.K. He started his academic career at the University of Minho, Portugal. He taught in the Department of Operational Research at LSE - The London School of Economics, was a Research Assistant at Imperial College London, and was a Visiting Scholar at Texas A&M University, USA. His research interests are in optimization and control theory, having a specific interest in nonlinear and constrained problems, optimal control, and model predictive control. His main scientific contributions are in model predictive control (stability and robustness conditions for nonlinear and sampled-data systems), in optimal control (stronger forms of the maximum principle and numerical methods), and nonlinear optimization methods (dynamic programming based and other global optimization algorithms). Lately, he has been interested in applying these methodologies to robotics and energy systems, particularly to Airborne Wind Energy Systems.