Marc-Antoine Leclerc

Biographie

Marc-Antoine Leclerc is a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke, where his research focuses on the dynamics, control, and performance of multirotor drones in challenging environments. He holds an advanced Canadian drone pilot certificate with over 200 hours of flight time on commercial and custom-built multirotors and fixed-wing drones.

During his Master’s, he designed and fabricated the NetherDrone, a tether-powered multirotor for underground mining inspection. It combines ducted propellers for efficiency and safety with a power-and-data tether enabling long-duration flight in GPS- and communication-denied environments. Multiple prototypes were built, lab-tested, and flown in active underground mines, demonstrating persistent tethered UAV operations in confined, harsh conditions.

His doctoral research, in partnership with Hydro-Québec, targets the precision and wind resilience of a 20-kg powerline inspection drone capable of landing on energized lines. He developed a frequency-split control scheme driven by small lateral thrusters that cut position error by over 76% relative to the same platform under conventional multirotor control in 50 km/h wind, with negligible added mass. The work spanned flight test planning and piloting, system identification from frequency-domain data, multi-objective control optimization, and firmware implementation in ArduPilot, validated through field trials in strong wind.