Safety Assessment for the Implementation of Autonomous Haulage Systems in an Open-Pit Mine

The implementation of autonomous haulage systems in open-pit mines is a progressive step in the industry, but it brings potential safety risks that need careful evaluation. This study developed a discrete event simulation model to analyze and evaluate these risks in different operating scenarios -fully autonomous, hybrid (a mix of autonomous and...

Guidance, Navigation and Control System Design of Envisat Active Debris Removal

Space debris is becoming one of the major risks to be suffered by operating and future space missions. Recent studies show that the number of potentially hazardous uncontrolled orbital bodies is growing with time, increasing the probability of impact with operational satellites. To counteract this problem, several studies are being suggested to...

Autonomous Maneuvering of a Waterborne Vehicle in Close Proximity of Obstacles

In the automotive industry, automation is on the rise and it increases safety while decreasing costs. Improved sensor performance and greater computing power steers the future of the shipping industry in the same direction. Avoiding obstacles in close proximity is one of the current challenges. This research provides a generic and open- source...

Safe and natural navigation in dynamic environments, learned from human behavior

Social Navigation is the task of robot motion planning in an environment shared with humans.This is an especially hard sub-problem of motion planning because the planner has to dealwith a dynamic, continuous and unpredictable environment. We present a local motionplanner, namely Neural Network Model Predictive Control, for autonomous ground...

Pedestrian Acceptance of Delivery Robots: Appearance, interaction and intelligence design

Technology developments are making it possible to start automating the last-mile of parcel logistics. This raises the question of how these autonomous technologies will interact with humans. The goal of this project is to design a concept of a delivery robot for DHL, that maximizes acceptance by pedestrians. <br/><br/>Literature research and...

Creating liveable cities by democratising streets: A dialogic approach towards data sharing in autonomous parking ecosystems

Ford democratised mobility in the early 1900s by providing the freedom to move for a broad audience. We are on the verge of a mobility revolution that could once again change the way we spend our time, allocate urban areas and shape communities. Cities evolved around the car and people started to realize this might not be the cities they want to...

Future City Hydrogen: Reality or Utopia?: A techno-economical feasibility study of an optimal stand-alone Solar-Electrolyzer-Battery-FuelCell system for residential utilization

The population worldwide is growing rapidly which leads to an increase of the energy demand. Simultaneously, the established energy resources are being depleted and contribute negatively to the climate. The necessity for a sustainable and inexhaustible energy source, to deal with the increasing energy demand in an ecological friendly approach,...

Onboard Visual Control of a Quadcopter MAV performing a Landing Task: on a Platform of Unknown Size and Location

Vision based control allows Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) to move autonomously in GPS-denied environments, for example in indoor applications. An open issue in this field is landing on an unknown platform. The difficulty in visual control w.r.t. such an unknown platform, is a lack of scale. Without knowledge of the scale of offsets and object sizes ...

Concept development of an unmanned, non-lethal, anti-piracy craft: The Beagle

Maritime piracy has been a problem for the last decades and peaked in 2010. This resulted in large investments in anti-piracy measures, but as piracy waned over the following years, so did the investments in anti-piracy measures. This could be an indication that the stage for maritime piracy has been reset. This report suggests a more efficient...

Design of an AutonomousWireless Weather Station: EE3L11 - Bachelor Graduation Thesis

With increasingly changing climates, measuring the weather on remote, off-grid locations has become more important in order to accurately track emerging weather patterns. Cheap and easy access to meteorological information allows communities and individuals to better manage agricultural development, track localised extreme weather events, and...

Modelling and Control of a Scaled Car In and Beyond Stable Limit Handling

Over the past century, cars have become the most important means of transportation. With the increasing number of vehicles on the road, safety has become an important topic. The introduction of driver assistance systems, like Electronic Stability Control, has led to a significant decrease in fatal accidents. By preventing the vehicle from...

Small Scale Methanol Production: Process modelling and design of an autonomous, renewable container sized methanol plant

At the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris in 2015, ambitious goals for the worldwide CO2 emissions were set. To achieve these goals, a huge reduction in CO2 emissions must be realized. For the energy market, the current aim is to use renewable electricity instead of fossil fuels. However, there are multiple sectors where...

Smart mobility: a strategic solution in urban development

This thesis researches the effect of smart mobility on parking space. To what extent will space become available and how can this be used for the restructering challenges within the urban enviroment?

Reinforcement Learning Across Timescales

This project addresses a fundamental problem faced by many reinforcement learning agents. Commonly used reinforcement learning agents can be seen to have deteriorating performances at increasing frequencies, as they are unable to correctly learn the ordering of expected returns for actions that are applied. We call this the disappearing...

Autonomous charging station for the ZEBRO

The ZEBRO is a fully autonomous six-legged robot designed for swarm behaviour and is the size of an A4 sheet of paper. However, there does not exist an charging station for the ZEBRO yet. At this time, the battery still has to be replaced manually, which defeats the purpose of an autonomous system. An autonomous charging station has to be...