Zoe Mbikayi

Zoe Mbikayi

Research Associate and Doctorate Candidate at the Institute of Flight System Dynamics, TUM

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Hi! I am Zoe. I am a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Institute of Flight System Dynamics of the Technical University of Munich - School of Engineering and Design. My doctorate is under the supervision of Prof. Dr. -Ing Florian Holzapfel of the Technical University of Munich, and Prof. Dr. Hugh Liu of the University of Toronto.

I spent most of my early academic years in Russia, studying at Moscow Aviation Institute, and working in its department of Flight Dynamics and Control as a lecturer and doing research in the Pilot Vehicle Laboratory, under Prof. Alexander Efremov. I also spent some time studying and working at Isae Supaero in Toulouse, France, in the department of Aerospace Vehicle Design and Control.

Research Interests

I am interested in flight control in general. Although in the past I did quite a bit of inner loop control, handling qualities and pilot-vehicle systems, now I am particularly interested in trajectory generation and control.

Check out my publications. Most of the papers are open access. But if you can’t find a paper, shoot me an email and I will be happy to share the PDF.

For those who have no idea what it means, well, I make flying things fly. By flying things, I mean aircraft, UAVs, airships, etc…

Personal Interests

  • Playing music: I play the Piano and the Guitar. Trying to learn the violin, the German Zither, and the accordion.

  • Photography: You can see some photos here.

  • Traditional archery: I have a nice takedown recurve bow with a riser made out of wood. I love it.

  • Mountain biking: Mostly doing XC down the trails.

  • Paragliding (Haven’t flown in a while though).

  • Messing around with computers and networks, and doing DIY: For example I built myself a closed smart home system - Jarvis, with a special focus on privacy.

    • I am following the same architecture as the human nervous system;
    • I try to build everything from scratch or use open source tools.
    • Most of Jarvis is written in python.
    • Jarvis is now a general purpose assistant, managing the home, having conversations, etc. It’s a bit like Alexa on steroids.

Just me

Zoe

Zoe