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The purpose of this technical note is to present a new formula to compute the incipient breaking wave properties based on a simplified solution of the wave energy flux conservation equation combined with Snell's law. The execution time and calculated results of the new formula were compared with those of the iterative method which is commonly used in coastal engineering calculations, including in

Industrial robots are fast and accurate when working with known objects at precise locations in well-structured manufacturing environments, as done in the classical automation setting. In one sense, limited use of sensors leaves robots blind and numb, unaware of what is happening in their surroundings. Whereas equipping a system with sensors has the potential to add new functionality and increase

Safe coexistence of industrial robots and human operators in the same workspace is one of the long standing goals of robotics research. One way to enforce safety is to endow the robotic system with additional sensors that can to some extent monitor the environment surrounding the robot and allow fast reaction to unexpected obstacles. This paper discusses the design of one such anti-collision syste

It has recently been shown that several classical open problems in linear system theory, such as optimization of decentralized output feedback controllers, can be readily solved for positive systems using linear programming. In particular, optimal solutions can be verified for large-scale systems using computations that scale linearly with the number of interconnections. Hence two fundamental adva

A fundamental problem in robotics is generating the motion for a task. How to translate a task to motion or a series of movements is a non-trivial problem. The complexity of the task, the structure of the robot, and the desired performance determine the sequence of movements, the path, and the course of motion as a function of time, namely the trajectory. As we discuss in this thesis, a trajectory

In high throughput applications, such as in multimedia, it is preferable to fully utilize computing resources, even at the price of some (bounded) delay. However, in real-time systems, where the maximum admissible delay is modeled by a deadline, most of the theory is developed with the assumption of a task deadline smaller than or equal to the task period. The reason of this limitation is in the i

We propose an energy-based framework for approximating surfaces from a cloud of point measurements corrupted by noise and outliers. Our energy assigns a tangent plane to each (noisy) data point by minimizing the squared distances to the points and the irregularity of the surface implicitly defined by the tangent planes. In order to avoid the well-known "shrinking" bias associated with first-order

In this paper we introduce a new algorithm for seismic imaging based on the flow out of Gaussian wave packets. We follow the standard strategy of decomposing data into wave packets and flowing them out along rays to approximate the downward wavefield extrapolation, and finally applying an imaging condition. We revisit each computational step to gain efficiency. Furthermore, we develop procedure fo

Semantic segmentation and object detection are nowadays dominated by methods operating on regions obtained as a result of a bottom-up grouping process (segmentation) but use feature extractors developed for recognition on fixed-form (e.g. rectangular) patches, with full images as a special case. This is most likely suboptimal. In this paper we focus on feature extraction and description over free-

This paper describes a new method of finding thin, elongated structures in images and volumes. We use shortest paths to minimize very general functionals of higher-order curve properties, such as curvature and torsion. Our method uses line graphs to find the optimal path on a given discretization, often in the order of seconds on a single computer. The curves are then refined using local optimizat

Many embedded systems comprise several controllers sharing available resources. It is well known that such resource sharing leads to complex timing behavior that degrades the quality of control, and more importantly, can jeopardize stability in the worst-case, if not properly taken into account during design. Although stability of the control applications is absolutely essential, a design flow dri

The first part of the thesis deals with adaptive CPU resource management for multicore platforms. The work was done as a part of the resource manager component of the adaptive resource management framework implemented in the European ACTORS project. The framework dynamically allocates CPU resources for the applications. The key element of the framework is the resource manager that combines feedfor

We consider the problem of trajectory generation for time-optimal path tracking for the class of pseudo-omnidirectional mobile robots. An Euler-Lagrange model of the robot dynamics is derived, and by writing it on special form a convex reformulation of the path-tracking problem can be utilized. This enables the use and regeneration of time-optimal trajectories during runtime. The proposed approach

We consider robust output feedback distributed model predictive control (DMPC). The proposed controller is based on the results in [8] in which nominal stability and feasibility was proven for a DMPC-formulation without terminal constraint set or terminal cost in the optimization. We extend these results to show robust stability under state feedback as well as output feedback when dynamics and mea

Current market trends for industrial automation are the need for customizable production, shorter time to market, and powerful global competitive pressure. Based on these trends two challenges have been identified: 1) flexible production systems and 2) integration and utilization of devices and software. Applications from both process automation, manufacturing, and robotics have been considered.

An approach for merging statically schedulable subr egions in dataflow models is pr esented. The approach combines abstr act int erpr etation, loop analysis, and static scheduling of cyclo-static dataflow networ ks. The approach has been implemented in a Java-based tool that per forms automatic classification of dataflow act or s, generat ion of stat ic schedules using constr aint programming, and