The rapid growth of the offshore wind energy sector demands the deployment of increasingly large wind turbines, requiring specialized heavy-lift vessels equipped with massive rotary cranes. Safe and efficient load transfer during maritime operations is severely challenged by lower-block (hook) sway, induced by vessel and crane motions. Automated anti-sway control can mitigate these operational risks, but relies on accurate real-time lower-block position and velocity feedback. While state-of-the-art lower-block localization approaches typically assume a rigid crane structure or require hook-mounted active hardware, this thesis presents a real-time state estimation framework based on vessel- and boom-mounted sensors. At the massive scale of offshore cranes, structural boom elasticity introduces significant bending deflections that corrupt joint-encoder measurements. To account for these dynamics, a multi-body non-linear model incorporating a flexible boom alongside wave-induced vessel motion is derived. This model serves as the predictor step for a multi-rate filtering architecture that fuses boom-mounted 3D LiDAR data, encoders, and a vessel Motion Reference Unit.
Both Extended (EKF) and Unscented (UKF) Kalman Filters are implemented and evaluated. By explicitly accounting for structural flexibility, the framework successfully limits tracking errors, achieving a position RMSE of 1.67-3.58 cm and a velocity RMSE of 0.66-5.52 cm/s, comfortably satisfying the requirements of 5.0-10.0 cm and 5.0-10.0 cm/s per axis, respectively. The EKF systematically outperforms the UKF, yielding an average 5.2% lower position RMSE and an 11% reduction in computational runtime, demonstrating the framework's viability for real-time industrial anti-sway control. ... Read more

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a controller and GUI for an AI loudspeaker filter design program. This program uses a genetic algorithm to create a combination of analog passive filters, one for each driver in a loudspeaker system. In the controller, two cost functions are designed to evaluate these filter combinations, and when the genetic algorithm has created its final filters, unnecessary components are removed and all component values are optimized. A GUI is created to allow easy user interaction.
For selecting a cost function, not enough data was obtained to make a deliberate decision based on performance. Therefore, this decision was based on theory and subordinate features. Nonetheless, the final program is able to create flat acoustic responses in a margin of 2 dB. ... Read more