Meta-heuristic improvement of order picking efficiency: Exploiting cross-order similarity in a goods-to-person warehouse

This research aims at determining a suitable order release strategy for a warehouse featuring a shuttle-based storage and retrieval system with multiple goods-to-person picking workstations. These picking workstations facilitate efficient picking; however, current release strategies do not take similarity between orders into account, while this...

Drift-free Localization of Ship Hull Cleaning Robots on Flat Bottoms: A Sonar-based Framework

Fleet Cleaner B.V. is a Dutch company which deploys a wheeled hull-fixed Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) to clean biofouling off the Vertical Sides (VSs) and the Flat Bottom (FB) of the hull of seagoing cargo vessels, while berthed at the harbour. To ensure maximal cleaning coverage, accurate localization to keep track of the robot trajectory on...

Development of a Detection and Tracking of Moving Vehicles system for 2D LIDAR sensors

The main objective of this thesis was the development and evaluation of a Detection and Tracking of Moving Objects (DATMO) system, that is capable of reliably tracking nearby vehicles from a moving car. The developed system takes in raw 2D LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) measurements as input and detects objects of interest by clustering...

Robotic swarm control through artificial pheromone trails: The case of curious ants

The extraordinary capability of swarming ant species in route finding and foraging efficiency through trail trail development has been studied for many years. Scientists have been able to capture the behavior of individual ants in control algorithms and used the resulting artificial swarm of ants to solve difficult problems. These problems...

Vehicle motion prediction for autonomous driving: A deep learning model based on vehicle interaction and road geometry using a semantic map

To be able to understand the dynamic driving environment, an autonomous vehicle needs to predict the mo- tion of other traffic participants in the driving scene. Motion prediction can be done based on experience and recently observed series of past events, and entails reasoning about probable outcomes with these past ob- servations. Aspects that...

Car-Following Model using Machine Learning Techniques: Approach at Urban Signalized Intersections with Traffic Radar Detection

This master thesis aims to gain new empirical insights into longitudinal driving behavior by means of the enumeration of a new hybrid car-following (CF) model which combines parametric and non parametric formulation. On one hand, the model, which predicts the drivers acceleration given a set of variables, benefits from innovative machine...

Nonlinear Geometric Control of a Quadrotor with a Cable-Suspended Load

A quadrotor is a type of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle that has received an increasing amount of attention recently with many applications being actively investigated. Possible applications include search and rescue, surveillance, supply of food and medicines in emergency situations and object manipulation in construction and transportation. An...

Adaptive strategies for platooning

Automated driving, one of the rapidly growing research topics in the field of smart traffic, has proved to be a recognized solution for potentially improving road throughput and reducing vehicles' energy consumption by grouping individual vehicles into platoons controlled by one leading vehicle. <br/><br/>The advances in distributed inter...