In 2008-2011 I was with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Precision Electromechanical Systems, ITMO University (Saint-Petersburg, Russia). I participated in a project on control systems design and implementation for a series of high-precision optical telescopes.
These telescopes are used in various applications, and satellite tracking is one of these tasks. Each telescope is equipped with a laser-based range sensor able to measure the distance from the telescope to a satellite, and the measurements from a network of telescopes are used, e.g., for navigation. To be able to measure the distance, the telescope must track the rotating satellite with a minimal tracking error. Such accuracy is provided by the following triple: gearless electrical drives, high-precision optical encoders, and control systems. In this project, I was a member of the control system design team, and the solutions I have designed are currently under exploitation.
The project results were also disseminated in the public sector via several publications in general-purpose journals and reports on TV news.