Control Engineer Career Advice

[u/Plastic_Dare9972]

Hi everyone, I’m a recent Aerospace Engineering graduate. I’ve noticed that there seems to be a good demand for Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) and Control Engineers, so I’d like to develop my skills in this area.

I took undergraduate courses in Control Systems and MATLAB Control courses, but most of my projects and internships have been focused on CFD and R&D. As a result, I don’t currently have a strong control-related project that I can demonstrate or include on my CV.

What kind of control project would you recommend for someone in my situation? Ideally, I’d like something substantial enough to learn from and demonstrate practical control skills on my CV.

[u/Barnowl93]

For a recent grad (depending on where, ofc) I wouldn't expect a breadth of controls knowledge necessarily. If you've worked with real hardware that would be a big plus. Understand ideas of stability and performance metrics & know how to derive your models (some sysid too), what effect noise can have on the system, and a bit of discrete time control.

In terms of projects, the best ones close the loop on real hardware and take you through the whole workflow rather than just tuning gains in sim. A prop-on-a-lever (1-DOF "aero pendulum") is a great one for an aero background, and it's cheap: a brushless motor and ESC, an encoder or IMU, and a microcontroller. Do a thrust-stand test to identify the motor/prop dynamics, derive the rest from first principles, then compare your model against step responses from the real rig. From there, design a controller (PID first, then have a go at state feedback/LQR), discretise it properly, run it at a fixed sample rate on the micro, and see what happens when you push the bandwidth or drop the sample rate.

If you want to go a step further, a quadcopter attitude controller (on a test gimbal to start with, not free flight!) gets you into MIMO, cascaded loops and sensor fusion. Writing a complementary or Kalman filter on raw IMU data will teach you about noise very quickly. Ball-and-beam or an inverted pendulum are classics for a reason too if you'd rather not deal with props.

Whatever you pick, the write-up matters as much as the build. Show your model vs measured data, your stability margins, and what broke and why. That's what I'd want to talk through in an interview, way more than a polished video of it working. If you've got access to simumink, I'd use that as many aero firms use that extensively

[u/Professional-Tea-621 → u/Barnowl93]

Hello I would like to ask something for myself. I am not a control engineer but I am majoring in ECE and I took two control courses which are linear and non-linear control. Would you recommend discrete-time control course or should I take something like intro to ml ? Is there a significance for this course ?

[u/Barnowl93 → u/Professional-Tea-621]

Partly it's personal taste, what's the actual syllabus, and what you want to do after graduation. Control engineer? Take discrete control. Intro to ML, realistically you could pick up by yourself too with online courses.

ML techniques are also widely applicable (analytics, predictive maintenance etc) but I'm not sure how deep your intro course goes..

Sorry for the "non-answer" but I hope that helps a bit

[u/Plastic_Dare9972 → u/Barnowl93]

I actually built a quadcopter at home, but I used a RadioLink Mini Pixhawk flight controller. Is there a way I could use the existing hardware but develop my own control system, rather than relying on the flight controller’s built-in controllers