This thesis explores how the benefits and drawbacks found in previous government-citizen use cases of Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) translate to a company environment PVE use case. This research is conducted at and with the help of Liander. Liander is one of three energy distribution system operators in the Netherlands. The following research question is answered: “To what extend do the benefits of PVEs that are deployed in citizen to government context apply to the use of PVE within a company environment?”. This is done by doing exploratory research within Liander and conducting a PVE survey for their asset management department about the architectural life cycle of a compact secondary substation. Previous use cases are explored to identify the benefits and drawbacks of PVE. Agency theory is used to make a comparison between the government-citizen environment and the company environment. This comparison and the principal-agent relation is used to make predictions on the results of the survey to see if the survey produces valid data. Two of the four benefits found in previous cases translated to a company environment and the drawback translates to a lesser extent. The PVE survey used in this thesis became more complex and much more on an operational level compared to previous PVE surveys. This resulted in a smaller group of relevant participants, which directly impacted the benefits. Employees see potential to use PVE in different ways that would benefit efficiency or the flow of information. These implementations vary a lot, but for all of them the current PVE tooling is unsuitable. PVE tooling could be adapted to suit this new type of use and to increase the ease of use for companies. Further research on the exact adaptations of the PVE tooling would be needed to implement this. Future research on the use of PVE in a business environment could focus on more strategic subjects. As an example, general strategic direction could be the subject of the PVE between a company board and the company shareholders. These subjects would more closely match previous PVE cases and would help provide context for the results of this thesis.

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 designed to complete the system. The charging station can be split into 3 parts: the autonomous charging station, the wireless power transfer, and the battery management system (located in the ZEBRO). In this particular thesis, the autonomous charging station will be discussed.
Since all components in the ZEBRO are built to be modular, the design of the autonomous charging station is chosen to fit this principle. The charging station will consist of one central unit, and several connectable (modular) pads. Each pad will be able to hold and charge a single ZEBRO in 30 minutes.
The charging station contains a communication module to communicate its location to ZEBRO's in need of charging. To calculate the locations of the connected pads, a grid will be created by serial communication between the charging station and the connected pads through Raspberry Pi's. (The pads do not have a communication module and do not have their location defined)
To power the wireless power transfer unit, a power supply of 48V and 500W will be implemented in the charging station. Each pad will consume about 100W, so a maximum of 4 pads can be connected. (Due to power loss). If more pads need to be connected, an additional power supply can be put in parallel.
All separate components have been simulated or tested and do work as predicted. The integration of all components of the charging station was successful as well. At this time, the complete system with the wireless power transfer and battery management system has not yet been put together and so it is unknown if it works as a whole.