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.

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.

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.

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.

[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

Results related to work by Dr. Thilina Nuwan Weerasinghe within the SFI Offshore Mechatronics has recently been featured in a news story published in Inside Telecom (in Norwegian language and only available to subscribers).

The news article explain how the research adresses performance issues in the 5G network. The expected massive increase in the number of connected devices requires new approaches. The grant-free method proposed in the research is in particular suited to grant access to devices with limited data transfer needs.