Comparing automated vehicles with human drivers: Improving motion comfort with motion planning and suspension control

This dissertation is dedicated to understanding the potential of improving the motion comfort of automated vehicles and explores multiple options that serve this purpose. Comfort is usually prioritized behind factors such as safety and efficiency but is nevertheless influential to the acceptance of automated vehicles. The goal of enhancing...

Tracking organoid cell fate dynamics in space and time

Throughout the lifetime of living systems, tissue homeostasis and renewal constantly take place to confront challenging conditions, both internally, such as cell aging, and externally, such as infections, so that health can be maintained. Such processes require a tight balance between cell proliferation and differentiation. When homeostasis is...

Stabilised Material Point Method for Fluid-Saturated Geomaterials

Large deformations in fluid-saturated geomaterials are central to numerous geotechnical applications, such as landslides and dam failures, pile installations, and underground excavations. An in-depth understanding of the soil's hydromechanical behaviour during large-deformation processes is essential for quantitative predictions about such...

Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics with Single Electron Spins in Silicon

This dissertation describes a set of experiments with the goal of creating a super-conductor-semiconductor hybrid circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture with single electron spins. Single spins in silicon quantum dots have emerged as attractive qubits for quantum computation. However, how to scale up spin qubit systems remains an open...

Autonomous Onboard Mission Planning for Multiple Satellite Systems

With the rising demands from customers and users and the development of ever advanced technologies, many space missions nowadays require more than one satellite to fulfill their mission objectives. Although replacing single satellite systems (SSSs) by multiple satellite systems (MSSs) offers advantages, such as enhanced spatial and temporal...

Delamination Analysis of A Class of AP-PLY Composite Laminates

A recently developed fiber placement architecture, AP-PLY, has been shown to give significantly improved damage tolerance characteristics of composite structures. The behavior of delaminations resulting from low speed impact damage is of particular concern. Major attention has been paid to expand current knowledge on the delamination response of...

Coordination of waterborne AGVs

The possible larger amount of container throughput and the limited handling capacities of existing infrastructures impose increasingly high pressure on large ports in improving competitiveness. Inside container terminals, land-side automated guided vehicles have been used extensively for decades to improve terminal operational efficiency and...

Modelling urban travel times

Urban travel times are intrinsically uncertain due to a lot of stochastic characteristics of traffic, especially at signalized intersections. A single travel time does not have much meaning and is not informative to drivers or traffic managers. The range of travel times is large such that certain travel times can occur for congested conditions...

Mesostructure of Concrete - Stereological analysis and some mechanical implications