Principal Investigator

Süleyman Yıldırım

Dr Süleyman Yıldırım

Assistant Professor · Department of Aerospace Engineering
Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Türkiye

I have been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU) since July 2024. My teaching covers aircraft performance, system dynamics, automatic control systems and aircraft instrumentation at undergraduate level, together with a specialist course on artificial intelligence and machine learning for aerospace engineering. I supervise postgraduate research on the guidance, control and autonomy of aerospace vehicles.

I received my PhD in Aerospace from Cranfield University (UK) in 2023. My doctoral research established a vision-guided robotic framework for the autonomous ground refuelling of civil aircraft. The framework integrates deep-learning-based visual localisation of the refuelling adaptor, real-time trajectory planning for a robotic manipulator, and hybrid datasets that combine real and photorealistic synthetic imagery to narrow the gap between simulation and deployment.

Before joining METU, I worked in industrial automation and robotics. As a Digitalisation and Automation Engineer at SMARTKAS Ltd (Essex, UK), I developed autonomous mobile robotic platforms, simulated robotic harvesting systems and implemented machine-learning and computer-vision pipelines for crop monitoring in fully automated vertical farms. Previously, as an Electrical Maintenance Engineer at Gürallar LAV Glassware (Kütahya, Türkiye), I worked on PLC-based process automation, industrial robotics and vision-guided robotic sorting in high-volume glass manufacturing.

Education

  • PhD in Aerospace, Cranfield University, UK, 2019–2023
    Autonomous Ground Refuelling of Civil Aircraft using Computer Vision and Robotics · Supervisor: Dr Zeeshan A. Rana
  • MSc in Computer and Machine Vision, Cranfield University, UK, 2018–2019
    Facial Expression Recognition using Computer Vision and Machine Learning: A Path to Deception Detection
  • BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Selçuk University, Konya, Türkiye, 2010–2014

Memberships

  • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
  • Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS)

Publications

Journal Articles

  1. S. Yıldırım and Z. A. Rana, “Enhancing Aircraft Safety through Advanced Engine Health Monitoring with Long Short-Term Memory,” Sensors, 2024. doi:10.3390/s24020518
  2. S. Yıldırım and Z. A. Rana, “Reducing the Reality Gap Using Hybrid Data for Real-Time Autonomous Operations,” Mathematics, 2023. doi:10.3390/math11071696
  3. S. Yıldırım, M. S. Chimeumanu and Z. A. Rana, “The Influence of Micro-Expressions on Deception Detection,” Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2023. doi:10.1007/s11042-023-14551-6

Conference Papers

  1. E. Müftüoğlu and S. Yıldırım, “Critic-Adapted Three-Stage TD3 Training for Impact-Angle-Constrained Terminal Guidance,” 27th National Conference on Automatic Control (TOK 2026), Ankara, 2026.
  2. S. Yıldırım, Z. A. Rana and G. Tang, “Development of Vision Guided Real-Time Trajectory Planning System for Autonomous Ground Refuelling Operations using Hybrid Dataset,” AIAA SciTech 2023 Forum, 2023. doi:10.2514/6.2023-1148
  3. S. Yıldırım, Z. A. Rana and G. Tang, “Autonomous Ground Refuelling Approach for Civil Aircrafts using Computer Vision and Robotics,” 2021 IEEE/AIAA 40th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), 2021, pp. 1–13. doi:10.1109/DASC52595.2021.9594312

Datasets