CH On December 11th, the 100th session of the "Lixing Lecture Series" at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, also serving as the 5th "Aerospace Zhiyuan Lecture" of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, was held in the lecture hall of the Aerospace Building. The event specially invited Professor Florian Holzapfel, Chair Professor at the Technical University of Munich and Director of the Institute of Flight System Dynamics, to deliver an academic report titled "Dynamics and Control Challenges of Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) Vehicles."
Attendees included Guo Liang, Secretary of the Party Committee of the China-UK International Low Carbon College, Liu Fucheng, Dean of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Xu Wu, Associate Dean of the school. The lecture was hosted by Hong Haichao, Associate Professor at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and was attended by over a hundred faculty members and students from the university.
Before the lecture, Liu Fucheng, on behalf of the school, presented a souvenir to Florian Holzapfel, thanking him for traveling a long distance to share cutting-edge research. Guo Liang welcomed Florian Holzapfel and expressed hope for deepening future collaboration between the two universities in academia and talent development. Florian Holzapfel expressed his honor at being invited and his desire to promote further exchanges between both sides.
In his report, Florian Holzapfel focused on the core challenges in dynamics modeling and control design for eVTOL aircraft. He pointed out that this field currently lacks mature engineering experience, generally facing prominent difficulties such as numerous uncertain model parameters, complex dynamics during transition phases, and heterogeneous actuators. Addressing these issues, he systematically introduced his team's innovative progress in areas such as configuration topology optimization and system-level fault-tolerant design, incremental control and dynamic allocation algorithms, runtime assurance control, and airworthiness compliance verification methods. These provide systematic engineering solutions for the safe design, control implementation, and airworthiness certification of eVTOLs. He also shared practical application experiences of related methods through examples.
The subsequent Q&A session was lively, with students actively asking questions about coping with complex disturbances, applications of machine learning technology, and high-fidelity numerical simulation. Florian Holzapfel provided detailed answers to each. At the end of the lecture, he highly praised the professional competence and enthusiasm for knowledge displayed by the SJTU students. Where aspiration leads, action takes you far! This lecture provided students with a valuable opportunity for in-depth communication with a leading expert in the field, broadening their understanding of the frontiers of eVTOL technology and industry trends.
Attending students expressed that the lecture not only deepened their professional knowledge but also ignited their interest in further learning and exploration, motivating them to pay more active attention to and engage in the development of related fields in the future.