Never Landing Drone

Increasing endurance is a major challenge for battery-powered aerial vehicles. A method is presented which makes use of an updraft around obstacles to decrease the power consumption of a fixed-wing, unmanned aerial vehicle. Simulatory results have shown the conditions that the flight controller can fly in.<br/>The effect of a change in wind...

Probabilistic downtime analysis for complex marine projects: Development of a modular Markov model that generates binary workability sequences for sequential marine operations

A complex marine project consist of series of operations, with each operation subject to a predefined operational limit and duration, depending on the equipment being used. If actual weather conditions exceed the operational limit, then the operation cannot be executed and hence downtime occurs. It is up to contractors, such as Boskalis, to...

Cost Effective Attitude Control Validation Test Methods for CubeSats Applied to PolarCube

The problem of testing the performance of an attitude control system presents new challenges and opportunities when conducted on a CubeSat scale. This is the result of drastic reduction in physical properties (size, mass, torques) as well as project resources (funds, manpower, time) when compared to traditional satellite programs. This thesis...