Dr. Sebastien Gros graduated from EPFL, Switzerland in 2001 in mechatronics, and joined the Laboratoire d’Automatique where he received his Ph.D. on “Neighboring Extremal in Optimization  Control”, and supervised several academic research projects on the control and optimization of aerospace  aeronautic applications. He then joined a RD group working on wind-turbine control at Strathclyde University, UK. In 2011, he joined the Highwind team. His current research area is the modeling, simulation, control  optimization of tethered flight. State-of-the-art, first principle models are developed specifically for optimization and control, where the cost of evaluating the model equations and their sensitivities is crucial. The resulting models consist in stiff or differential-algebraic equations (DAE) requiring ad-hoc treatments. Model identification  calibration is formulated as constrained Least-Squares problems. Sensor fusion  parameter estimation is tackled through real-time Moving-Horizon Estimation (MHE). The inherent time-scale separation of airborne systems is exploited in the control and estimation architecture so as to achieve the control sampling times required for the rejection of perturbations. Robust  economic Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) techniques are developed for airborne systems.