The major problem of robotics research today is that there is a barrier to entry into robotics research. Robot system software is complex and a researcher that wishes to concentrate on one particular problem often needs to learn about details, dependencies and intricacies of the complete system. This is because a robot system needs several different modules that need to communicate and execute in parallel. Today there is not much controlled comparisons of algorithms and solutions for a given task, which is the standard scientific method of other sciences. There is also very little sharing between groups and projects, requiring code to be written from scratch over and over again. This thesis proposes a general framework for robotics. By examining successful systems and architectures of past and present, yields a number of key properties. Some of these are ease of use, modularity, portability and efficiency. Even though there is much consensus on that the hybrid deliberate/reactive is the best architectural model that the community has produced so far, a framework should not stipulate a specific architecture. Instead the framework should enable the building of different architectures. Such a scheme implies that the modules are seen as common peers and not divided into clients and servers or forced into a set layering. Using a standardized middleware such as CORBA, efficient communication can be carried out between different platforms and languages. Middleware also provides network transparency which is valuable in distributed systems. Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE) is an approach that could solve many of the aforementioned problems. It enforces modularity which helps to manage complexity. Components can be developed in isolation, since algorithms are encapsulated in components where only the interfaces need to be known by other users. A complete system can be created by assembling components from different sources. Comparisons and sharing can greatly benefit from CBSE. A component-based framework called ORCA has been implemented with the following characteristics. All communication is carried out be either of three communication patterns, query, send and push. Communication is done using CORBA, although most of the CORBA code is hidden for the developer and can in the future be replaced by other mechanisms. Objects are transported between components in the form of the CORBA valuetype. A component model is specified that among other things include support for a state-machine. This also handles initialization and sets up communication. Configuration is achieved by the presence of an XML-file per component. A hardware abstraction scheme is specified that basically route the communication patterns right down to the hardware level. The framework has been verified by the implementation of a number of working systems.

<p>Litorapid Media AB is a printer and prepresscompany, located on Hisingen, Gothenburg. Litorapid is a relatively large company, and is therefore in great need of convenient contacts with becoming and present customers. Seeing that they work with the most rescent technique in the branch of printing, it is important that they market themselves in a modern way. The purpose with this project became, for that reason, to create a more contemporary home page for the company to catch new customers, as well as aninteractive presentation of the company to create a more personal contact with customers they alreay have. </p><p>The home page was created in the programme Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, and its design is based on previouly distributed brochures. The interface is very much adapted to please the user. The interactive presentation of the company is created in Macromedia Director 7 and is divided into three different divisions. One part where you can get practical information concerning how to hand in information to Litorapid, one which serves the purpose of giving the same information as the home page, and the last and largest part is a tour of the company in eight steps, where one can follow a printed matter being produced from start to finish. The material used is gathered at Litorapid’s office with a digital camera and a videorecorder. </p><p>The final result is a homepage and a presentation of the company, showing the activity of Litorapid in a appealing and personal way. Furthermore, it is easy for customers to find the information they need. The new hompage is modern, and the introduction helps to catch the eye of an Internet user. The interactive presentation of the company gives us more details of Litorapid’s activity and is entertaining as well as informative. With these two marketing products Litorapid is shown as a contemporary printer.</p>

<p>There are several methods avaliable to find areas of interest, but most fail at detecting such areas in cluttered scenes. In this paper two methods will be presented and tested in a qualitative perspective. The first is the darg operator, which is used to detect three dimensional convex or concave objects by calculating the derivative of the argument of the gradient in one direction of four rotated versions. The four versions are thereafter added together in their original orientation. A multi scale version is recommended to avoid the problem that the standard deviation of the Gaussians, combined with the derivatives, controls the scale of the object, which is detected. </p><p>Another feature detected in this paper is rotational symmetries with the help of approximative polynomial expansion. This approach is used in order to minimalize the number and sizes of the filters used for a correlation of a representation of the orientation and filters matching the rotational symmetries of order 0, 1 and 2. With this method a particular type of rotational symmetry can be extracted by using both the order and the orientation of the result. To improve the method’s selectivity a normalized inhibition is applied on the result, which causes a much weaker result in the two other resulting pixel values when one is high. </p><p>Both methods are not enough by themselves to give a definite answer to if the image consists of an area of interest or not, since several other things have these types of features. They can on the other hand give an indication where in the image the feature is found.</p>

<p>Denna rapport beskriver utvecklingen av examensarbetet som utfördes på uppdrag av BrandEx Brandtätningar AB. Ett företag som brandskyddar byggnader, fartyg, oljeplattformar med mera. En officiell webbsida och en CD-ROM-produktion skapades åt företaget. </p><p>Webbsidan konstruerades i webbredigeringsprogrammet Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 och CD-ROM-produktionen i multimedieprogrammet Macromedia Director 7. Det använda materialet innehöll bilder och PDF-filer som BrandEx hade i sitt arkiv, men mycket nytt skapades, exempelvis animeringar och egna musikstycken. Webbsidan gjordes enligt önskemål från BrandEx med en enkel ochstilren design. CD-ROM-produktionen skapades under friare förhållanden med avseende på innehåll och design. Innehållet blandades med animeringar, en videofilm, bilder, text, ljud och musik. </p><p>Både webbsidan och CD-ROM-produktionen gjordes mer som produktionsmallar åt BrandEx. De skall själva kunna uppdatera dessa med ny information. BrandEx kommer att ge ut CD:n till kunder och andra intressenter som vill veta mer om företaget och om brandskydd. Den skall distribueras kostnadsfritt. Webbsidan kommer att vara den centrala informationsplatsen för BrandEx i Sverige. </p> / <p>This report describes the process of the examination work that was made after an offer from BrandEx Brandtätningar AB. A company that fireprotects buildings, ships, oil platforms and so on. An official web site and a CD-ROM-production were created for the company. </p><p>The web site was constructed in the web editing software Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 and the CD-ROM-production in the authoring tool for multimedia production Macromedia Director 7. The used material contained pictures and PDF-files from BrandEx archives, but lot of new material was created, for instance animations and own music tracks. The web site was made according to the wishes from BrandEx in a simple and pure design style. The CD-ROM-production was created under rather free conditions concerning content and design. The content was mixed with animations, a video, pictures, text, sounds and music. </p><p>Both the web site and the CD-ROM-production were made more like production templates for BrandEx. They will be able to update with new information by themselves. BrandEx will issue the CD to customers and other partners that want to know more about the company and about fireprotections. It will be freely distributed. The web site will be the central place of information for BrandEx in Sweden.</p>

<p>This master thesis has been done at Enea Epact AB. The purpose of this thesis is to develop and implement a Link Quality Control algorithm for GPRS/EPGRS in the current testing tool. A Link Quality Control (LQC) shall take quality values from mobile stations and base stations and decide a codingsscheme that opimizes the throughput of data. </p><p>The Advantage with LQC is that it adapts the used coding scheme to the channel quality. If the channel quality is too bad for the used coding scheme, a slower coding scheme with more redundancy should be selected. On the other hand, if the channel quality is too good for the used coding scheme, LQC should recommend a faster coding scheme with less redundancy. </p><p>The testing tool is now using a static coding schme that doesn’t change during a data session. An LQC is therefore necessary for better simulation of the traffic and to make the tests more real.</p>

<p>The purpose behind this thesis is to develop a software (SceneServer) that can generate data such as images and vertex lists from computer models. These models are placed in a virtual environment and they can be controlled either from a graphical user interface (GUI) or from a MATLAB client. Data can be retrieved and processed in MATLAB. By creating a connection between MATLAB and a 3D environment, computer vision algorithms can be designed and tested swiftly, thus giving the developer a powerful platform. SceneServer allows the user to manipulate, in detail, the models and scenes to be rendered. </p><p>MATLAB communicates with the SceneServer application through a Java library, which is connected to an interface in SceneServer. The graphics are visualised using Open Scene Graph (OSG) that in turn uses OpenGL. OSG is an open source cross-platform scene graph library for visualisation of real-time graphics. OpenGL is a software interface for creating advanced computer graphics in 2D and 3D.</p>

<p>This thesis investigates how systolic architectures can be used in the implementation of an arithmetic unit for small finite fields of characteristic two with polynomial basis representation. </p><p>Systolic architectures provide very high performance but also consume a lot of chip area. A number of design methods for tailoring the systolic arrays for a specified requirement are presented, making it possible to trade throughput, chip area and propagation delays for oneanother. </p><p>A study is also made on how these systolic arrays can be combined to form an arithmetic logic unit, ALU, that canperform operations in many different fields. A number of design alternatives are presented, and an example ALU is presented to give an idea of the performance of such a circuit.</p>

<p>Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) is used to obtain images showing the vascular system. To detect stenosis, which is narrowing of for example blood vessels, maximum intensity projection (MIP) is typically used. This technique often fails to demonstrate the stenosis if the projection angle is not suitably chosen. To improve identification of this region a color-coding algorithm could be helpful. The color should be carefully chosen depending on the vessel diameter. </p><p>In this thesis a segmentation to produce a binary 3d-volume is made, followed by a distance transform to approximate the Euclidean distance from the centerline of the vessel to the background. The distance is used to calculate the smallest diameter of the vessel and that value is mapped to a color. This way the color information regarding the diameter would be the same from all the projection angles. </p><p>Color-coded MIPs, where the color represents the maximum distance, are also implemented. The MIP will result in images with contradictory information depending on the angle choice. Looking in one angle you would see the actual stenosis and looking in another you would see a color representing the abnormal diameter.</p>

<p>Most traffic accidents are caused by human factors. The design of the driver environment has proven essential to facilitate safe driving. With the advent of new devices such as mobile telephones, GPS-navigation and similar systems the workload on the driver has been even more complicated. There is an obvious need for tools supporting objective evaluation of such systems, in order to design more effective and simpler driver environments. </p><p>At the moment video is the most used technique for capturing the drivers visual behaviour. But the analysis of these recordings is very time consuming and only give an estimate of where the visual attention is. An automated tool for analysing visual behaviour would minimize the post processing drastically and leave more time for understanding the data. </p><p>In this thesis the development of a tool for visualising where the driver’s attention is while driving the vehicle. This includes methods for playing back data stored on a hard drive, but also methods for joining data from multiple different sources.</p>

<p>Detta examensarbete är gjort åt ingenjörsfirman Navo AB i Karlstad. Syftet med arbetet är att förvandla och återskapa en befintlig instruktionsbok i pappersform till en komplett interaktiv presentation med 3D-animationer skapade i Cult3D. En metodik för att skapa instruktions-boken ska utarbetas, samt utreda vilka möjligheter Cult3D har för arbetet. Det mesta av materialet är hämtat från elektroniska källor. </p><p>Rapporten delas in i två delar: en teoridel och en utförandedel. Teoridelen presenterar de använda programmen och beskriver dess funktioner med tyngdpunkt på Cult3D. Denna 3D-motor har med fotorealistiska ytor, användarvänlighet och möjligheten att komma närmare verkligheten, snabbt blivit världsledande inom interaktiv 3D-grafik. Den praktiska delen beskriver hur instruktionsboken tagit form, hur programvarorna använts och hur de beslut bakom tekniska- och designmässiga lösningar tagits. </p><p>Resultatet blev en fullt funktionerlig, interaktiv instruktionsbok med illustrativa Cult3D-objekt. Den är färdig att användas vid en arbetsstation från antingen CD-media eller lokal hårddisk. </p> / <p>This degree project is made for the engineering firm Navo AB in Karlstad. The aim of the report is to turn an existing paper manual into an interactive presentation with 3D animations created in Cult3D. A method to create the manual will be prepared and to find out which possibilities Cult3D has for the work. Mostof the material in the report is taken from various electronic sources. </p><p>The report is divided in two parts: a theory and a practical part. The theory part presents the used software and describes their functions with more detailed information about Cult3D. This 3D motor has rapidly been world leading within interactive 3D graphics because of its user ability, photo realistic surfaces and the possibility to reach reality. How the manual took shape is described in a practical part. It describes how the software has been used and the decisions behind the design and technical solutions. </p><p>The result was a fully functional, interactive manual with illustrative Cult3D objects. It is ready to use at a workstation from either a CD or a local harddrive.</p>