Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a tool for mapping the subsurface in a non-invasive way. GPR surveys are currently carried out manually; a time-consuming, tedious and sometimes dangerous task. This report presents the high-level software components for an autonomous unmanned ground vehicle to conduct GPR surveys. The hardware system is a four-wheel drive, skid steering, battery operated vehicle with integrated GPR equipment. Autonomous surveys are conducted using lidar-inertial odometry with robust path planning, path following and obstacle avoidance capabilities. Evaluation shows that the vehicle is able to autonomously execute a planned survey with high accuracy and stops before collisions occur. This system enables high-frequency surveys to monitor the evolution of an area over time, allows one operator to monitor multiple surveys at once, and facilitates future research into novel survey patterns that are difficult to follow manually

In direct teleoperation the interface is vital to control a robot. Often it is reduced to a simple controller and the feedback provided by a camera stream in a monitor which leads to poor results. A telepresence system combined with a Free Look Control is proposed to increase the result in terms of situational awareness, usability and comfort. The telepresence system provides the sense of depth to the operatorin several manners. Free Look Control replaces Tank Control as control mode, in which the robot can be driven in any direction and the operator takes the control of the camera. A synergy is found when both features are implemented together as their advantages are increased. In addition a multi-camera setup is created, in order to build the 3D environment shown to the operator, which is calibrated in an automatic way. The two different control modes are tested and compared by several people. The outcome shows how the inclusion of these characteristics improve the result of the teleoperation in a visible way.

Emotion AI är ett forskningsområde som syftar till att teknik ska kunna känna igen och reagera på mänskliga känslotillstånd, vilket kan implementeras i form av chattbotar. Chattbotens roll är idag framträdande inom kundtjänstområdet och används för att stärka kundservice. Tidigare forskning visar att det råder brist av kvalitativa studier om hur chattbotar responderar på och hanterar känslor som uppstår när människor interagerar med chattbotar i vardagen. Syftet med studien är därav att skapa förståelse för hur känslor hanteras av chattbotar och vilka upplevelser som genereras vid kundtjänstinteraktion mellan människa och chattbot.  Studien antog en kvalitativ ansats och inleddes genom en förstudie som identifierade fyra chattbotar, vilka användes vidare till intervjustudien. Datainsamlingen har genomförts med hjälp av semistrukturerade intervjuer och kompletterades med observation. Analysen identifierade fyra typer av upplevelser av chattbotarnas förmåga att respondera på känslointeraktion: bekräftelse, missförstånd, problemlösning och ideal chattbot. Studien diskuterar hur chattbotar påverkar människans känsloupplevelse och hur chattbotar bör designas i kundtjänstinteraktion. Slutsatsen är att det inte finns behov att utveckla chattbotar med väldigt komplex känsloförmåga och känslomässig förståelse har visats vara sekundärt i kundtjänstinteraktion. Dock bör chattbotar designas med en enklare form av känslomässig förmåga eftersom det kan skapa mervärde genom att kunderna känner sig förstådda. / Emotion AI is a research area aimed at technology recognizing and reacting to human emotions, which can be implemented in the form of chatbots. The chatbot's role is today prominent in the field of customer service and is used to strengthen customer service. Previous research shows that there is a lack of qualitative studies on how chatbots respond to and manage emotions that arise when people interact with chatbots in their everyday life. The purpose of the study is therefore to create an understanding of how emotions are handled by chatbots and what experiences are generated during customer service interaction between humans and chatbots.  The study adopted a qualitative approach and was initiated through a feasibility study that identified four chatbots, which were used for the interview study. The data collection was carried out using semi-structured interviews and supplemented by observation. The analysis identified four types of experiences of chatbots' ability to respond to emotional interaction: affirmation, misunderstanding, problem-solving, and ideal chatbot. The study discusses how chatbots affect the human emotional experience and how chatbots should be designed for customer service interaction. The bottom line is that there is no need to develop chatbots with very complex emotional abilities and emotional understanding has been shown to be secondary in the customer service interaction. However, chatbots should be designed with a simpler form of emotional ability as it can create added value in the form of making customers feel understood.

Autonomous vehicles are regularly predicted to be on the verge of broad integration into regular traffic. A crucial aspect of successful traffic interactions is one agent’s ability to adequately understand other agents’ capabilities and limitations. Within the current state of the art concerning self-driving cars, there is a discrepancy between what people tend to believe the capabilities of self-driving cars are, and what those capabilities actually are. The aim of this study was to investigate whether people attribute the capacity of object permanence to self-driving cars roughly in the same manner as they would to a human driver. The study was conducted with online participants (N = 105). The results showed that the participants did not attribute object permanence differently between a self-driven car and a human driver. This indicates that people attribute object permanence similarly to self-driving cars as they do toward human drivers. Furthermore, the results indicate no connection between participants’ tendency to anthropomorphize and whether they attributed object permanence or not. The findings provide evidence for the issues connected to the perceptual belief problem in human-robot interaction, where people attribute capabilities to autonomous vehicles that are not there. The results highlight the importance of understanding which mechanisms underlie these attributions as well as when they happen, in order to mitigate unrealistic expectations.

Detta projekt åsyftade att möjliggöra för en industrirobot att illustrera godtyckliga digitalabilder på en plan yta. Detta uppnåddes genom att utrusta en manipulator med ett ritverktyg. Genom digital bildbehandling så kunde rörelsemönster genereras vilka matades till industriroboten för att den skulle kunna återskapa den digitala versionen. Roboten ritar med en teknik benämnd pointillism som innebär att endast punkter plottas. Resultatet blir en konkret svartvit representation av originalbilden. Projektet genomfördes på institutionen Industriell Produktion på Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan. Projektet är i sin natur väldigt inriktat på forskning och utveckling eftersom det går ut på skapandet av en teknik för att uppnå ett tydligt mål. Kontinuerlig utveckling var kopplat till målet för att förbättra resultatet från olika aspekter. / This project strived to enable an industrial robot to illustrate arbitrary digitized images on a planar surface. This was accomplished by equipping a robotic manipulator with a drawing utensil. Motion patterns were generated based on digital image processing and fed to the robot for it to imitate the digital version. The robot prints with a technique called pointillism, which implies that solely points are plotted. The result is a tangible black and white representation of the original image. The project was carried out in the Production Engineering facilities at the Royal Institute of Technology. The nature of the project is very research and development oriented as it deals with the creation of a technology to achieve an explicit goal. Continuous development was related to the goal to improve the result from different aspects.

Background. Automation in production has become a necessity for producing companies to keep up with the demand created by their customers. One way to automate a process is to use a piece of hardware called a programmable logic controller (PLC). A PLC is a small computer capable of being programmed to process a set of inputs, from e.g. sensors, and create outputs, to e.g. actuators, from that. This eliminates the risk of human errors while at the same time speeding up the production rate of the now near identical products. To improve the automation process on the shop floor and the production process in general a special software system is used. This system is known as the manufacturing execution system (MES), and it is connected to the PLCs and other devices on the shop floor. The MES have different functionalities and one of these is that it can manage instructions. Theses instructions can be aimed to both employees and devices such as the PLCs. Would the MES suffer from an error, e.g. in the instructions sent to the shop floor, the company could suffer from a negative impact both economical and in reputation. Since the PLC is a computer and it is connected to the MES it might be possible to attack the system using the PLC as leverage. Objectives. Examine if it is possible to attack the MES using a PLC as the attack origin. Methods. A literature study was performed to see what types of attacks and vulnerabilities that has been disclosed related to PLCs between 2010 and 2018. Secondly a practical experiment was done, trying to perform attacks targeting the MES. Results. The results are that there are many different types of attacks and vulnerabilities that has been found related to PLCs and the attacks done in the practical experiment failed to induce negative effects in the MES used. Conclusions. The conclusion of the thesis is that two identified PLC attack techniques seems likely to be used to attack the MES layer. The methodology that was used to attack the MES layer in the practical experiment failed to affect the MES in a negative way. However, it was possible to affect the log file of the MES in one of the test cases. So, it does not rule out that other MES types are not vulnerable or that the two PLC attacks identified will not work to affect the MES. / Bakgrund. Automatisering inom produktion har blivit nödvändigt för att företag ska kunna tillgodose den efterfrågan som deras kunder skapar. Ett sätt att automatisera denna process är genom att använde en typ av hårdvara som på engelska kallas för programmable logic controller (PLC). En PLC är en liten dator som man kan programmera så att den bearbetar signaler in, från t.ex. sensorer, och skapar signaler ut, till t.ex. motorer, från det. Detta eliminerar då risken för mänskliga fel samtidigt som det snabbar upp produktionen av de nu nästan identiska produkterna. För att förbättra automatiseringsprocessen på golvet i fabrikerna och även tillverkningsprocessen generellt så används ett speciellt mjukvarusystem. Detta system kallas på engelska execution manufacturing system (MES), och detta system är kopplat till PLCerna och annan utrustning på produktionsgolvet. MESen har olika funktionaliteter och en utav dessa är hantering av instruktioner. Dessa instruktioner kan vara riktade både till anställda samt utrustning så som PLCer. Skulle det inträffa ett fel i MESen, t.ex. i instruktionerna som skickas till produktionsgolvet, så skulle företaget kunna få lida av negativa konsekvenser både ekonomiskt och för företagets rykte. I och med att en PLC är en dator och den är kopplad till MES så kan det finnas möjligheter att utföra attacker mot MESen genom att använda en PLC som utgångspunkt. Syfte. Undersöka om det är möjligt att utföra en attack på en MES med utgångspunkt från en PLC. Metod. En litteraturstudie genomfördes för att ta reda på vilka typer av attacker samt sårbarheter relaterade till PLCer som publicerats mellan 2010 och 2018. Ett praktiskt experiment utfördes också, där attackförsök gjordes på ett MES. Resultat. Resultatet är att det finns många olika attacktyper samt sårbarheter som upptäckts relaterade till PLCer och att de attacker som utfördes i det praktiska experimentet inte lyckades skapa några negativa effekter i det MES som användes. Slutsatser. Slutsatsen för examensarbetet är att två olika typer av de hittade PLC-attackerna verkar vara kapabla till att användas för att attackera MES-lagret. Metoden som användes i det praktiska försöket lyckades inte påverka MES-lagret negativt. Men det gick att påverka MESens logfil i ett av testfallen, så det går inte att fastslå att andra MES-typer inte är sårbara mot detta eller att de två identifierade PLC-attackerna inte kommer kunna påverka MES-lagret negativt.

This thesis studies motion planning for future autonomous vehicles with main focus on passenger cars. By having automatic steering and braking together with information about the environment, such as other participants in the traffic or obstacles, it would be possible to perform autonomous maneuvers while taking limitations of the vehicle and road–tire interaction into account. Motion planning is performed to find such maneuvers that bring the vehicle from the current state to a desired future state, here by formulating the motion-planning problem as an optimal control problem. There are a number of challenges for such an approach to motion planning; some of them are how to formulate the criterion in the motion planning (objective function in the corresponding optimal control problem), and how to make the solution of motion-planning problems efficient to be useful in online applications. These challenges are addressed in this thesis. As a criterion for motion-planning problems of passenger vehicles on doublelane roads, it is investigated to use a lane-deviation penalty function to capture the observation that it is dangerous to drive in the opposing lane, but safe to drive in the original lane after the obstacle. The penalty function is augmented with certain additional terms to address also the recovery behavior of the vehicle. The resulting formulation is shown to provide efficient and steady maneuvers and gives a lower time in the opposing lane compared to other objective functions. Under varying parameters of the scenario formulation, the resulting maneuvers are changing in a way that exhibits structured characteristics. As an approach to improve efficiency of computations for the motion-planning problem, it is investigated to segment motion planning of the full maneuver into several smaller maneuvers. A way to extract segments is considered from a vehicle dynamics point of view, and it is based on extrema of the vehicle orientation and the yaw rate. The segmentation points determined using this approach are observed to allow efficient splitting of the optimal control problem for the full maneuver into subproblems. Having a method to segment maneuvers, this thesis further studies methods to allow parallel computation of these maneuvers. One investigated method is based on Lagrange relaxation and duality decomposition. Smaller subproblems are formulated, which are governed by solving a low-complexity coordination problem. Lagrangian relaxation is performed on a subset of the dynamic constraints at the segmentation points, while the remaining variables are predicted. The prediction is possible because of the observed structured characteristics resulting from the used lane-deviation penalty function. An alternative approach is based on adoption of the alternating augmented Lagrangian method. Augmentation of the Lagrangian allows to apply relaxation for all dynamic constraints at the segmentation points, and the alternating approach makes it possible to decompose the full problem into subproblems and coordinating their solutions by analytically solving an overall coordination problem. The presented decomposition methods allow computation of maneuvers with high correspondence and lower computational times compared to the results obtained for solving the full maneuver in one step.

The concept Industry 4.0 brings several technologies that could be useful for the factories and manufacturers to become more competitive. One of these technologies is the robots in collaborative environments which operate fenceless together with the operators. The interest of these robots in the manufacturing sector has been getting more attention in recent years. These implementation types require the organizations to determine their readiness levels to have success with the robot. Currently, the successful implantations of the robots in collaborative environments in industry are few, and the success factors must be mapped. Therefore, investigating the potential barriers, enablers and establishing a road map for a case company could be useful to fill this gap and assist the organizations with what is necessary to accomplish a successful implementation. A case study was conducted at a manufacturing company in Sweden, which allowed for insights into how an actual organization approaches the situation. The case company organization was in the process of acquiring a robot in a collaborative environment, hence, the data from the case company was relevant to answer the research questions. Furthermore, the data was collected using interviews, observations, and documents at the case company. A literature review was performed to provide information regarding the common factors within a RCE implementation, which also was a base for the interview guide. The data was analysed by comparing the theoretical framework and with the empirical findings to bring forth a conclusion and to establish a road map for the case company. A road map was created with sets of questions to address the identified barriers and enablers found in both literature and at the case company. The constructed road map contains questions concerning the areas of knowledge about the robot in collaborative environments, communication & information, organizational aspects, and resistance towards the change. By addressing the questions developed in the framework, the organization could get an advantage when considering the implementation of the robot. For the case company, as they are further along in the process, the road map could indicate how well they have performed in current projects. Furthermore, it could generate a more successful project the next time.

The use of virtual reality in engineering tasks, such as in virtual commissioning, has increased steadily in recent years, where a robot, machine or object of interest can be simulated and visualized. Yet, for a more immerse experience, an environment for the object in question needs to be constructed. However, the process for creatingan accurate environment, for a virtual simulation have remained a costly and a long endeavour. Because of this, many digital simulations are performed, either with no environment at all, or present a very basic and abstract representation of an intended environment.The aim of this thesis is to investigate if technologies such as LiDAR and digital photogrammetry could shorten the environment creation process. Therefore, a demonstrative virtual environment was created and analysed, in which the different technologies was investigated and presented in the form of a comprehensive review of the current state of the technologies with in digital recreation. Lastly, a technique specific evaluation of the time requirement, cost and user difficulty was conducted. As the field of LiDAR and digital photogrammetry is too vast to investigate all forms thereof within one project, this thesis is limited to the investigation of static laser scanners and wide lens camera photogrammetry. A semi industrious locale was chosen for digital replication, which through static laser scans and photographs would generate semi-automated 3D models.The resulting 3D models leave much to be desired, as large holes were present throughout the 3D models, sincecertain surfaces are not suitable for neither replication processes. Transparent and reflective surfaces lead to ripple effects within the 3D models geometry and textures. Moreover, certain surfaces, as blank areas for photogrammetry or black coloration for laser scanners led to missing features and model distortions.Yet despite the abnormalities, the majority of the test environment was successfully re-created. An evaluation of the created environments was performed, which list and illustrate with tables and figures the attributes, strengths and weaknesses of each technique. Moreover, technique specific limitations and a spatial analysis was carried out. With the result, seemingly illustrating that photogrammetry creates more visually accurate 3D models in comparison to the laser scanner, yet the laser scanner produces a more spatially accurate result. As such, a selective combination of the techniques can be suggested.Observations and interviews seem to point towards the full scale application, in which an accurate 3D model is re-created without much effort, to currently not exist. As both photogrammetry and static laser scanning require great effort, skill and time in order to create a seemingly perfect solid model. Yet, utilizing either, or both techniques as a template for 3D object creation could reduce the time to create an environment significantly.Furthermore, methods such as digital 3D sculpting could be used in order to remove imperfections and create what is missing from the digitally constructed 3D models. Thereby achieving an accurate result.

Användning av Virtual Commissioning (VC) i samband med digitala modeller/tvillingar ges ett stort värde i framtidens industri. Inom konceptet industri 4.0 omnämns Smart Factory (SF) som är en av de viktigare aspekterna inom industri 4.0, detta har för avsikt att adressera utveckling bestående av integration, digitalisering och användning av flexibla strukturer och smarta lösningar. Varav en del i detta ges av så kallad VC och Digital Twin (DT). På ett naturligt sätt medför detta att denna typer av studier gälande användningsområdena av VC ges vikt inför kommande utveckling. Detta projekt har sitt fokus i att studera möjligheterna kring användning av VC och DT i de tidigare stadierna i ett projekt. En prototyp kommer att skapas.  Projektet kommer att erkänna tillvägagångssättet när det gäller ökningen av mjukvarukvalitet och minskning av buggar inför driftsättningen av den fysiska processen. Detta kommer att göras genom en tillämpning i form av en automatiserad sorteringsprocess Sorteringsprocessen kommer att hantera och fördela enligt godkänd och icke godkänd produkt. Sorteringsprocessen genomgick en validering av tredje part som anses godkänd. Driften och säkerheten kommer att vara det centrala för att bedöma dugligheten av modellen. Därmed avgörs huruvida denna VC metod kan ges tillförlitlighet gällande industriell projekttillämpning. / The use of virtual commissioning in connection with digital models / twins is given great value in the future industry. The concept of Industry 4.0 promotes Smart Factory, which requires well-orchestrated developments in integration, digitalization and use of flexible structures and smart solutions. Part of this is provided by so-called Virtual Commissioning (VC) and Digital Twin (DT). Therefore, it is important to study these for future development. This study focuses on studying the possibilities of using VC and DT regarding the earlier stages in a project. The thesis will acknowledge this approach in terms of the increase regarding software quality and bug reduction comes the physical commissioning of the process. This will be done through an application in the form of an automated sorting process.  In this process, two products will be tested and then sorted as either approved or non-approved. Once the functional sorting process has been developed, it did undergo a validation test with an approved result. This validation test is be divided into two different sections where the operation of the process and safety will be central for assessing the feasibility of the model and thus determining whether this VC method can be considered as reliable for industrial project applications.