Når en mobil robot begir seg ut i et dynamisk miljø for å utføre enoppgave er det mye den må ta hensyn til. Ikke bare må roboten holderede på hvor den er og hvor den skal, den må også sørge for at kinematiske,dynamiske og oppgavebestemte begrensninger overholdes. Endaviktigere er det at roboten ikke uforvarende støter borti mennesker, dyreller gjenstander som befinner seg i området. Denne rapporten presentereret design og en implementasjon av et algoritmesystem som skalhåndtere utfordringene en slik robot står overfor. Systemet er basertpå det elastiske veikartet utformet av Yang og Brock [23], som er ennyskapende og effektiv tilnærming til problemet bevegelsesplanlegging.Systemet presenteres i sammenheng med en bred oversikt overlitteratur og teori som behandler planleggingstemaet, med fokus påsamplings- og tilbakekoblingsbasert planleggingsmetodikk.Det implementerte algoritmesystemet demonstreres og analyseresgjennom en rekke simulerte testscenarioer. Resultatet er et utvidbartog fremtidsrettet planleggingssystem som kan planlegge og utføre enbevegelse mellom en start- og målposisjon, og kan i sanntid håndtereendringer i robotens omgivelser.

The main objective in this thesis is to explore if a model predictive control scheme can increase the energy efficiency in office buildings with waterborne heating systems. The number of office buildings is constantly increasing, which displays the importance of efficient control systems. Since the aim is to decrease the energy consumption, improving the control systems in existing buildings and developing smart control schemes for new buildings are equally important. That is why the vision in this thesis is to design a control scheme that theoretically can be introduced to all new and existingoffice buildings. The model predictive controller’s objective is therefore to minimize the supply water temperature to the heating system, while fulfilling a set of defined indoor temperature demands.The model is the most important tool when comparing different control schemes. It is derived using an electrical analogy, and includes the most important thermodynamical relations in three rooms, a ventilation system, and a district heating system. To achieve optimal control of the supply-water temperature, a constrained optimization problem is introduced through a model predictive control scheme. Two versions of the model predictive control scheme are compared with a conventional control scheme. The first version is an ordinary formulation with some ad-hoc solutions including time-varying output constraints, while the second version is a robust formulation includingslack variables. The energy-consumption analysis imply that a 33 % - 34 % reduction potential is obtainable if a model predictive control scheme is introduced.

Invasive measurements of cardiac functioning allows for more accurate measures of cardiac functioning than non-invasive measurements. However, invasive measurements is often not available in clinical settings. By comparing invasive and non-invasive measurements collected in an experimental context, better relationships between non-invasive measurements and cardiac functioning may be found. This master thesis describes the development of two computer applications for simultaneous acquisition, calibration and synchronization of these measurements. The developed applications were tested out during operations on pigs with all measurement sources connected. The results shows that all the desired measurements were successfully acquired by the system. Calibration of the different measurement were also achieved. Different methods for synchronization were tested out during the experiments. It was possible to achieve synchronization of all clocks present in the system. Finally, all of the desired parameters were calculated.

It is of interest for companies to keep the annual operating cost of their buildings as low as possible. A substantial share of the annual operating costs are due to the large amount of energy needed for heating of the ventilated air and heating of the rooms inside the buildings. Also much of the electrical energy in the world today is created using fossil fuel or charcoal. This has an environmental aspect and the consumers of energy becomes more and more aware of this. Thus reducing the energy used by a buildings HVAC system can save the users for considerable expenditures and also has an environmental aspect.To find an estimate of the energy consumption a mathematical model representing a building and its HVAC system have been made. This model has been made up of several smaller models representing each component present in the building. These models have then been implemented in verb|Simulink| and the response of the system has been simulated for different scenarios. From these simulations the energy consumption has been extracted and compared to each other. Thus the amount of energy saved for each scenario has been found. The models include two type of controllers to see whether or not the choice of controller design affects the energy efficiency of the system. These two controller designs are the PID controller and the MPC control scheme. Also a discretized and simplified model of the building to be used together with the MPC controller has been found using system identification. In addition to this a Kalman filter that estimates unknown states and filter out disturbances are included in the MPC control scheme.The results from the simulations using a PID controller indicates a possible annual saving of substantial amounts. Thus this report shows that the annual energy consumption in a building can be greatly reduced by introducing simple and relatively cheap modifications to the HVAC system. The results from the simulations using the MPC scheme indicates that even more energy can be saved using this advanced control scheme. However, in order to verify this the MPC controller needs to be fine tuned and several more experiments needs to be reviewed.

Current automotive safety systems restrict the vehicle to the linear region of operation where the sideslip angle is small. Recent research in the field has discovered that drifting possesses unstable equilibria in which the vehicle is controllable even after the handling limits in the linear region have been exceeded.This thesis presents the design and simulation of a feedback linearization controller that, by using yaw rate as input to controlling the sideslip angle, is able to find the equilibrium point corresponding to the initial velocity and the desired yaw rate. Simulation results show that the controller is able to achieve a yaw rate within 5 degrees of the desired yaw rate. It is demonstrated that utilization of drifting techniques increases the maneuverability of the vehicle compared to normal cornering. Based on the successful handling of coupling in actuator authority at high angles of sideslip, feedback linearization as a control design tool is recommended for further development of controllers in the LocalHawk project.The LocalBug simulator has been improved by the addition of a dc motor model that includes selection of front, rear and four wheel drive. Measurement of the moment of inertia of LocalBug and recording of true noise data, which is added to the simulator output, has increased the fidelity of the simulator. Validation of the simulator shows that the simulation results largely is in agreement with logged test data, except for the case of hard breaking where the simulation model is inclined to experience a spin.

This thesis presents an innovative approach to social robotics through gesture recognition. The focus is on recognizing gestures because this is an important aspect regarding interpretation of a person's intent when he or she gives commands to a robot.The equipment used is a Kinect sensor, developed by Microsoft, attached to a moving platform. The Kinect communicates with software running on a PC through the OpenNI interface and uses the NITE middleware by PrimeSense.The results of this thesis are: - a broad literature study presenting the state of the art of gesture recognition - a system which handles the problems that arise when the Kinect is non-stationary - a gesture recognizer that observes and analyzes human actionsThere are mainly two problems that are solved by the implemented system. First, user labels might be incorrectly swapped when the Kinect's standard algorithm loses track of a user for a few frames. Second, false-positive users are detected, as the Kinect is assumed stationary. Because of this, everything that moves relative to the Kinect is marked as a user. The first problem is counteracted by mapping the observed label to where it was last seen. The second problem is solved using a combination of optical flow and feature analysis.The gesture recognizer has been developed to allow robust and efficient segmentation, joint detection and gesture recognition. To achieve both high efficiency and good results, these algorithms are tailored to be used with the high quality user silhouettes detected by the Kinect. In addition, the default Kinect algorithm needs some time to initialize when a new human user is detected. The implemented gesture recognizer has no such delay.

The need for dynamic positioning to function in ice-infested waters is growing as the offshore oil and gas industry enters the Arctic. The ice introduces great challenges, some of which can be resolved through proper ice management. This requires good knowledge of the surrounding ice-environment.This thesis deals with the question of achieving a good state estimator for a sea-ice model. The dynamic thermodynamic sea-ice model of Hilber III (1979) is implemented, and it is shown through simulations that it reacts in a realistic manner to varying air temperature. The states of this model are estimated with an ensemble Kalman filter, and it is shown that different states can be estimated very well by ensemble Kalman filters based on different measurement configurations. This implemented nonlinear sea-ice model and state estimator is meant to serve as a platform where methods designed to select measurement configurations best suited for state estimation can be tested.A suggestion for a method which chooses measurement configurations on-line is presented. The idea is that this method allows for different measurement configurations to be applied at different time steps, all based on which one that provides the best estimate at the current time. Unfortunately there was no time to implement this method and test it on the previously mentioned test platform; it must be kept in mind that it is merely a theoretical suggestion which must be further tested.

Intraoperative ultrasound strain imaging of the brain visualizes brain tissue deformation as an image. The hypothesis is that strain and elastographic values can be used to complement conventional B-mode image in the task of brain tumor segmentation. A key asumption is that the natural pulsation of the cerebral arteries causes deformation in the brain tissue that is measurable with ultrasound.Strain values are found with a least-squares technique that estimates the spatial derivative of axial velocity, which in turn is mea- sured using a phase-based velocity estimator. A correlation coefficient is calculated for each estimate, giving an indicator of estimation accuracy. Additionally a method for hiding estimates of bad quality based on correlation coefficient thresholding is demonstrated. More- over, a novel elastographic processing technique suitable for cineloop display is introduced. This method extracts a stiffness parameter from a series of strain images, producing an elastogram. A graphical user interface allowing the user to change parameters and see the corresponding result in real-time, minimizing the time needed for parameter optimization, has been developed.The method has been tested using an elasticity phantom. The phantom elastogram cineloop shows a live image that visualizes the difference between stiff and soft tissue well, portraying information not found in the B-mode image. The conclusion is that the proposed elastographic technique, combined with correlation coefficient thresholding, produces elastograms that are suitable for real-time display. This technique is not limited to imaging of the brain, and could, with different parameters, be used for imaging other parts of the body as well.Clinical data sets from two brain tumor patients have been studied as well, where the estimated velocity, strain and elastographic values is discussed in detail. In both patients the tissue movement due to arterial pulsation was measurable with ultrasound. For one patient, a correlation was found between tissue pathology and estimated strain and elastographic values. For the second patient the strain and elastographic processing broke down, and no similar correlation was found.

Prediktor AS har hatt et ønske om å forbedre kontrollen av innetemperaturen i sine lokaler i Fredrikstad. Denne oppgaven har blitt gitt som en avsluttende masteroppgave ved institutt for teknisk kybernetikk ved NTNU.Det har blitt utviklet en lineær modell på formen dx/dt=Ax+Bu for energiflyten i Prediktors lokaler i Fredrikstad. Modellen er basert på fysiske betraktninger ved selve bygningsmassen, fysiske prinsipper for energibalanser og målinger gjort i bygget. Disse betraktningene er det gjort rede for i denne rapporten. Målingene er gjort delvis med instrumenter allerede plassert i bygningen ved oppgavens start, og delvis med instrumenter satt opp i løpet av arbeidet med oppgaven. Måleresultatene er innhentet ved hjelp av Prediktors egen APIS-programvare, og i denne rapporten er betraktninger rundt instrumenteringen, det utførte instrumenteringsarbeidet samt detaljene rundt innhentingen av data gjort rede for.Det har blitt utviklet en reguleringsstrategi for systemet. Regulatoren er basert på Kalmanfiltrering og LQ-regulering, og blitt utvidet og tilpasset reguleringsproblemet for å oppnå best mulig ytelse.

I denne oppgaven er det presentert instrumentering og reguleringssystem av produksjonsprosess for plankton. Systemet er utviklet og implementering med to tanker for produksjon av planktonet rotatorier. PC brukes som styresystem og grensesnitt mot bruker. Regulering av rotatorietetthet med en ny strategi for tilførsel av fôr og vann er implementert og testet. Systemet fungerte tilfredsstillende foruten den nye strategien som trenger mer testing for å fungere optimalt.