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The DARPA Grand Challenge (DGC) 2005 was a competition, in form of a desert race for autonomous ground vehicles, arranged by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). The purpose was to encourage research and development of related technology. The objective of the race was to track a distance of 131.6 miles in less than 10 hours without any human interaction. Only public GPS signa
The US Department of Defense wants one third of ground military forces to be automated by 2015. By using self-driving military vehicles, American troops can be kept out of harm's way in the battlefield.1 To speed up the development, the US Department of Defense decided to arrange a desert race for autonomous vehicles, DARPA Grand Challenge. Team Caltech is entering the Challenge with the vehic
The 'Spider Crane' is a crane structure that has been developed at the department for automatic control at 'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne'. This crane structure does not have a moving mechanical structure, which enables it to move the load much faster than a conventional crane. In a previous thesis project a control algorithm for the crane behavior has been developed. Th
Untripped SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle) rollovers are dangerous and possibly lethal accidents. This thesis address some issues in the detection and prevention of untripped SUV rollovers. Before a rollover can occur, the wheels on one side must lose road contact. The wheel lift-off situation is chosen as the critical situation to be avoided. If wheel lift-off is prevented, then rollover is prevented
This master thesis work concerns fault detection and isolation (FDI) of an electro-mechanical servo using analytical redundancy. The purpose is to reduce the number of sensors used in today's fault detection schemes and at the same time keep the level of redundancy in the system. The report will start with a comparison between physical and analytical redundancy. Whichever design method that is
The content of this master thesis regards the implementation of a control system in RTLinux/Free, and the use of this for control of a straight track inverted pendulum. A controller developed on the hypothesis that the system is sampled with the sampling time ts will perform differently than expected if sampled with the sampling time t _= ts. If implemented in a regular operating system, the compu
Thermoacoustic instability is a phenomenom that appears in several technical applications, for instance rocket and jet engines, gas turbines, waste generators and industrial burners where it can cause heavy damage to the systems. As with most instabilities, they are undesired and this thesis' purpose is to identify and control a Rijke tube process (which has been used to stimulate the thermoac
During the production of pharmaceutical products, a central stage is so called fermentation process i.e. cultivation of bacteria in a biological reactor. In the scope of this Master Thesis the product is recombinant protein. The goal for the fermentation process is to keep a high cell growth and a high production of recombinant proteins. For these purposes, an automatic control algorithm has been
This master thesis project has been performed in cooperation with AGA, the well-known gas company which is a part of the German Linde group and the Department of Automatic Control, Lund Institute of Technology. Since summer 2000 AGA has developed and manufactured a fully automated reactor producing bicarbonate solution for stabilizing pH in papermaking processes. The reactor or ACU!22 (alkalinity
The deteriorating effects of friction on the control of mechanical systems is a major problem in a multitude of applications such as high-performance robotics and pointing systems. This thesis aims at improving control by using a nonlinear friction observer to detect friction in the system and use this information to modify the control input. After some initial attempts with the LuGre friction mod
This master thesis is the first step in developing a new laboratory process for the automatic control basic course. The new process should illustrate the benefits of state-space control compared to PID control. A process with several outputs to control is then desired as a single PID controller does not support such a system. The suggested process consists of two carts mounted on a linear rail and
In this thesis the possibility to use the discrete-event modelling tool JGrafchart as a front end to the object-oriented modelling language Modelica has been studied. In this context, a code generator from JGrafchart to Modelica has been implemented. The code generator includes the basic JGrafchart objects like steps, transitions and variables, but also hierarchical elements like macrosteps and in
Using flying vehicles for reconnaissance and surveillance has always been interesting, especially in military applications. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been increasingly used in the last decades, but they have often been controlled by an operator on the ground. In an attempt towards higher level of autonomy, the UAV should be able to decide itself where to fly. This thesis examines a meth
This master's thesis has been performed in cooperation with TAC in Malmö. The TAC group makes commercial buildings smarter by integrating and automating the technical systems required to run them. TAC:s control systems use PID-controllers to control processes such as heating and ventilation. The PID-controllers are often badly tuned, since it is too timeconsuming to calculate good PID-paramete
Abstract I would like to thank my mentor Richard Murray at the Control and Dynamical Systems Department of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for giving me the opportunity of conducting my master's thesis at Caltech and for his support during the project. I would also like to thank my other mentor Anders Rantzer at the Department of Automatic Control of Lund Institute of Technology u
The aim of this work was to investigate the possibilities and consequences for Haldex Traction of starting to use the OSEK/VDX standard for realtime operating systems. This report contains a summary of the realtime operating system documents produced by OSEK/VDX. OSEK/VDX is a committee that produces standards for realtime operating systems in the European vehicle industry. The report also contain
In this thesis a control loop asset monitor is developed for ABB's automation system 800xA. The asset monitor developed here is based on ABB's Loop Performance Manager, which also is described here as well as the general properties and functions of an asset monitor. The asset monitor is a prototype for the 800xA system and a detailed description of how to implement asset monitors into the
This thesis describes an effort to enhance the control capabilities of an electric motor. It is in the interest of TetraPak that the research on this motor is performed so that it, in the future, can be a part of their production systems. The thesis has been separated into three main parts, where in the first part we are trying to find a model that describes the process. The second part describes
One of the most difficult problems that an engineer who works with modeling deals with, is the question about how to translate a physical phenomenon into a set of equations. It is usually difficult to capture all dynamics and phenomena, so one usually strives for a set of equations that describes the physical system approximately and adequately with the accuracy for the purpose. In our case, we mo
During the last years the number of Electrical Control Units (ECU) in vehicles have increased rapidly with the effect of increasing costs. To meet this trend and reduce costs, applications have to be centralized into more powerful ECUs. This gives rise to new problems such as data and temporal integrity. The thesis gives an introduction to these new problems and a solution based on static time-tri
