News

Registration for the Annual Conference

By Asle Pedersen

The registration for the consortium members to the two-day SFI Offshore Mechatronics annual and final conference is now open. The conference is hosted at UiA, campus Grimstad. The conference is organized over two days, with the first day (June 20.) being closed to consortium members only. Note that this registration form is for the full two-day conference for consortium members only.

Program Tuesday, June 20th

08.30 – 09:00Registration
09:00 – 09:10Welcome & Introduction
09:10 – 09:40How SFI Offshore Mechatronics started and lessons learnt
Geir Hovland (Former Center Directory) and Rachel F. Syrtveit (Former Administrative Manager)
09:40 – 10:00WP1.6 Energy Efficient Offshore Hydraulic Systems with focus on linear Actuation: Wei Zhao (UiA)
10:00 – 10:20WP1.7 Energy Efficient Offshore Hydraulic Systems with focus on rotary Actuation: Thomas Farsakoglou (AAU)
10:20 – 10:40Poster session / Coffee break
10:40 – 11:00WP2.6 Real-Time Teleoperation and Model-based Control of Cranes with Loads: Philipp Schubert (RWTH)
11:00 – 11:20Presentation of new motion platform and knuckle-boom crane test-bench (Daniel Hagen, UiA)
11:20 – 11:40WP3.7 Coupled dynamics between vessel and crane: Ronny Landsverk (UiA/KD)
11:40 – 12:00WP3.8 Formal Verification of Autonomous Systems: Yvonne Murray (UiA/Pioneer Robotics)
12:00 – 12:50Lunch
12:50 – 13:10WP 3.9 Sensor fusion for perception, collision avoidance and navigation towards autonomous systems: Jose Amendola (UiA)
13:10 – 13:30WP5.4 Condition-based lifetime prediction as result of calculated component loads: Mohamed Yousri (RWTH)
13:30 – 13:50WP6.3 Design of soft-sensors based on novel context-aware data fusion techniques: Kevin Roy (UiA)
13.50 – 14:10WP6.2 Novel methods for context-aware data reduction of multiple dependent time-series: Emilio Ruiz (UiA)
14:10 – 14:30WP7.1 The management of digital business model innovation: Marius Kristiansen (UiA)
14.30 – 14.40Awards
14.40 – 15:15Poster session / Coffee break
15:30Transport to hotel (Scandic) and check-in ( + optional visit to the labs)
17:00Boat trip with M/S Østerøy from Grimstad harbor
19:00 – 21:00Dinner at Marivold Resort
21:15 – 22:00   Boat trip with M/S Østerøy to Grimstad harbor

Program Day 2

The program for the second day is not yet finalized. The schedule in the second day is from 9.00 to 16.15 in time for people traveling by plane from Kjevik (multiple domestic and international flights have departure at 18.15).

We have set the deadline to register to June 2nd, but please register as soon as possible as this will be very helpful in the planning and preparation of the conference.

Rooms are reserved at Scandic Hotel Grimstad. Use reservation code: UNI190623 in your booking (NOK 1330 per night).

Project period extended to September 30th

By Asle Pedersen

Our project started on March 30th 2015, and with an 8-year project period, the official finishing date for the project was March 30th 2023. Eight years is a long duration and some delays are to be expected. In particular the Covid-19 pandemic resulted for various reasons in some delays.

Fortunately, with great support from the Norwegian Research Council, we are happy that we were able to extend the project period with six months until September 30th. This will will allow us to have more PhD defenses completed within the project period and allows us to host the annual and final SFI Offshore Mechatronics conference in Grimstad on June 20.-21.

Research Impact Canvas

By Asle Pedersen

Defining, mapping and following-up research results with innovation potential is a core activity in our SFI Offshore Mechatronics center. To support our work a tool called Research Impact Canvas was developed back in 2018. In addition to the The Research Canvas by iMinds, the main inspiration for the tool was the questions crafted by George H. Heilmeier (DARPA, 1975-1977) known as the Heilmeier Catechism.

The tool was developed in 2018 by Innoventus Sør (Asle Pedersen and Ranveig Tobiassen) as part of the project “Kommersialisering av forskning fra SFI Offshore Mechatronics” with funding from the Research Council Norway, FORNY2020 program.

The completed canvas results in an executive summary of the project including problem statement, todays practice, alternative solutions, expected results, competitive advantages, and IPR. To guide the answer to the questions a “Step-by-Step” guide is embedded in the template.

The tool can be used for different purposes, but the main usage in SFI Offshore Mechatronics is to interview the PhD students about their research project. A draft canvas can be completed by the PhD students individually. To ensure consistency and to challenge and refine the answers, it is advised to complete the canvas in collaboration with someone with prior experience in using the canvas.

Technically the tool is just a PowerPoint template, with one slide per question. The template uses the PowerPoint zoom feature to generate a compact and condensed one-page overview (requires Office 2016/Office 365 or higher to work properly). The canvas is typically distributed as a PDF either in the condensed one-pager format or in a notes hand-out format.

In addition to being used as an internal tool to assess innovation potential, the canvas is also an efficient format to communicate expected results and potential use-cases to the industry partners. With supervision from Ellen Nordgård-Hansen in Work Package 7, ten new canvases and 6 canvases drafted earlier were completed in 2022.

We are happy to share the tool which is distributed using a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. This means that the tool can be shared and adapted, as long as appropriate credit is given. To get a copy of the PowerPoint template reach out to asle.pedersen@uia.no.

Best Paper Award to Kevin Roy, WP6.3

By Asle Pedersen

The paper “Joint Learning of Topology and Invertible Nonlinearities from Multiple Time Series” was awarded with Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Seminar on Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science (ISMODE 2022). The event took place as a virtual conference organized by Universitas Krisnadwipayana, Indonesia, on December 22.-23 2022.

The first author of the publication is Kevin Roy, which is doing his PhD at University of Agder as part of WP6 in SFI Offshore Mechatronics. The publication co-authors are Luis Miguel-Lopez formerly PostDoc in our centre and Baltasar Beferull-Lozano, WP6 work-package leader.

Congratulations to Kevin and his co-authors on this achievement.

Webinar Series

By Asle Pedersen

We are starting up a new series of our webinars. The topic this time is software and tools for modeling and simulation and the scope is methods and approaches to cross-domain and cross-tool simulations.

The webinars should be of interest to modeling & simulation (M&S) professionals as well as software teams supporting M&S based services. The webinars are open and anyone can join!

We have scheduled three webinars in November and December:

17. November Marine applications of co-simulationGlenn Tørå, cDynamics
01. DecemberDTASM: A portable and sandboxed package format for executable simulation modulesMoritz Allmaras & Harald Held, Siemens Energy
15. December
Postponed to 2023. New date will follow.		Interoperability and running FMUs with special constraintsThomas Haraldsen Evang, Kongsberg Maritime

All the webinars are short 30-min presentations and scheduled from 13:45-14.15. The webinars are hosted on Teams (we use the same Teams link for every webinar).

We intend to follow up with more webinars in 2023. If you have suggestions for topics and speakers reach out to Asle.Pedersen@uia.no.

General Assembly 2022

By Asle Pedersen

The SFI Offshore Mechatronics General Assembly will take place on November 10. 13.00-14.00. The meeting will be hosted at UiA, Campus Kristiansand, Meetingroom A7 001.

The General Assembly is a closed, partner only meeting. The partners should have received an e-mail calendar invite. If you are a partner and did not receive the invitation get in touch with asle.pedersen@uia.no.

Spin-off project effort related to offshore wind

By Asle Pedersen

With NORCE Research as the consortium leader a consortium of 14 partners have submitted a proposal to “Grønn plattform 2022”, a program jointly funded by the Research Council of Norway, Innovation Norway and SIVA.

Seven of the partners in SFI Offshore Mechatronics is involved in this new initiative called Building Industry for Offshore Wind Technology (BUIOWT).

Results and knowledge generated from the SFI Offshore Mechatronics is to a large extent directly applicable and will play in important role in the scale-up of the offshore wind industry.

If granted the project will start early 2023 with a budget of 116MNOK and with a project period of three years. GCE Node has published a news story related the the application.

Short news and upcoming events

By Asle Pedersen

[Event] Reference group meeting WP6 [6. September*]

[Event] SFI Offshore Mechatronics, Steering Board meeting [8. September, UiA, Campus Grimstad]

[Event] Industrial applications of 5G, Kristiansand [14. September, Hosted by GCE Node.]

[Event] EtherCat Seminar Series, Grimstad [20. September, Hosted by EtherCat Technology Group (ETG)]

[Event] Reference group meeting WP5 [20. October, hosted at Cameron, Andøya, Kristiansand*]

[News] The Mechatronics group at University of Agder has launched a new Linkedin group

* Note that reference group meetings are for consortium members only