Modeling of a Twisted and Coiled Polymer Muscle

A new type of polymeric artificial muscle was recently discovered. This muscle is based on twisted and coiled polymer fiber and is actuated thermally. It has interesting properties, such as low costs and high work densities. Based on fabrication methods, two variations can be considered. The autocoiled variation has a larger load capacity and...

Vision-based velocity control on a Philips Experimental Robot Arm

The challenge in this thesis is to find out if an off-the-shelf embedded system can replace an off-the-shelf laptop or desktop computer when its task is to perform vision-based velocity control using inverse kinematics on a robotic arm. The results of this thesis are that an algorithm was developed which had to be tested in simulation and should...

Theoretical Analysis and Experimental Investigation of a Bidirectional Inductive Power Transfer System Applicable for Electric Vehicle Charging

The utilization of IPT technology in electric vehicles (EVs) charging applications and in the microgrid restoration/islanding mode, has the potential to bring about a change in how EVs are perceived today. Firstly in consumer level, by making the charging process more convenient, safe and user-friendly, by removing the messy cords , and secondly...

Wireless control of LED display lighting system using Bluetooth and Android

This thesis will describe our research and process during the Bachelor project "Wireless control of LED lighting system using Bluetooth and Android". Our team was a 4 man team, where we, the authors, worked on the Android app development, the PCB design and the Power Supply. For work done on an FPGA and the flexible LEDs, see thesis written by P...

Building a GUI for Nuna's Mission Control

In the history of the World Solar Challenge, a six day challenge from Darwin to Adelaide, one car has proved to be dominating: the Nuon Solar Car. A telemetry application played an important role in this, but needed to be updated. This was realised by the new Mission Control application project: "Building a GUI for Nuna's Mission Control". In...

Real-Time Optimistic Planning for the Control of Nonlinear Systems

Optimistic Planning is a model-based online planning algorithm that guarantees near-optimal actions for the control arbitrarily nonlinear systems. Planning algorithms aim to find optimal actions by starting from the current state and developing a tree representation of sequences of actions and resulting states, using a model to simulate state...

Nonlinear System Identification and Control for Autonomous Robots

Most robots receive information about their own dynamics or about their environment before starting to work on their tasks. This makes them less fit for operating in unknown environments without human supervision. In this thesis, the goal is to let a robot learn the relation between its actions and perceptions autonomously. This problem is...

Automatic trajectory tracking control of kites

In this thesis we present a novel solution to the kite trajectory tracking problem using an explicit control law. Compared to alternative approaches, such as model predictive control, our approach has three major advantages: a stability proof, ease of implementation, and minimal modeling requirements. The latter is especially important for...

Control of magnetic bearings in wind turbines

Direct drive generators applied to large wind turbines present some problems, such as very heavy and expensive price. The use of magnetic bearings has a possibility to reduce the weight of the direct drive generator. The control system for such magnetic bearings is considered. In the beginning, the thesis discusses the problems of direct drive...

Modular RT-Motion USB Software Framework

Philips Applied Technologies has developed the RT-Motion USB platform as a compact distributed real-time motion control platform, but the platform can still be improved by developing a more advanced software framework. The goal of this thesis project is to design a modular software framework to complement the RT-Motion USB platform with...

Operation of grid-connected DFIG under unbalanced grid voltage condition

Doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) still shares a large part in today's wind power market. It provides the benefits of variable speed operation cost-effectively, and can control its active and reactive power independently. Crowbar protection is often adopted to protect the rotor-side voltage source converter (VSC) from transient overcurrent...

Quantum control for an experimental contactless energy transfer system for multiple users