Elisa Capello

Elisa Capello is a Full Professor of Flight Mechanics at Politecnico di Torino, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (DIMEAS). She serves as Contact person for internationalization of innovation and technology transfer, Member of the Interdepartmental Center PIC4SeR (PoliTO Interdepartmental Center for Service Robotics), and Deputy Coordinator of the Doctoral College in Aerospace Engineering. With over 100 publications, her work spans aerospace engineering, control systems, and robotics.

Her research focuses on flexible spacecraft, flight control systems, robotic systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles. She designs guidance, control and navigation systems for aircraft and spacecraft, develops control systems for wind turbines and wind farms, studies flight mechanics of fixed and rotary wing aircraft, tests unmanned aerial systems, and plans mission control for autonomous systems. Her work bridges theoretical control systems with practical aerospace applications, with strong emphasis on experimental validation.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on advanced control techniques for aerospace applications, particularly in UAV control, spacecraft formation flying, and robotic systems. There's a clear trend toward integrating machine learning with traditional control methods, as seen in transformer-based MPC and multimodal learning approaches. Her work spans theoretical development, simulation, and experimental validation across multiple platforms.

• Member of the Editorial Board of IEEE Control Systems Society (2019-)
• Member of the Scientific Committee - IEEE Technical Committee Aerospace Control (2016-)
• International FAI Judge for Helicopter Championship (2009-2015)

Professor Capello supervises numerous PhD students working on topics including autonomous aerial vehicles, path planning, risk analysis, spacecraft dynamics, and control. She leads multiple research projects including CREATEFORUAS (2019-2022), Assessment of drag free control systems for L3 gravity wave observatory (2018-2019), and Guidance, Navigation and Control algorithms for in-Orbit servicing (2020-2021). Her international collaborations include institutions in the USA, Japan, and Germany.

She is actively involved with the Flight Dynamics, Control and Simulation research group at DIMEAS and the DRAFT (DRones Autonomous Flight Team) at PoliTo, where she mentors students in developing autonomous flight capabilities for various applications.