In the fall 2020 we scheduled short webinars on Teams every second week. The motivation was initially to compensate for the cancellation of the annual conference and workshop. As a side effect we anticipate that the webinars will also result in increased interaction in the center outside of our major events. We have had good attendance with 15 attendees on average. Attendees is a mix between SFI affiliated researchers, from the industry partners and the mechatronics department at UiA. We will continue with the webinars in 2021 every second Thursday from 13.45-14.15.

The preliminary program for Q1-2021 (subject to change): 21/1: Optimization using brute force on GPU (Geir Hovland, UiA)
4/2: Real-time containers (Florian Hofer, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) 
18/2: Introduction to Julia programming language (Mattias Fält, Lund University) 
4/3:  Host and Build Your Academic/Professional Portfolio for Free using Hugo and GitLab CI/CD (Sondre S. Tørdal, UiA)  
18/3: ONNX – Open Neural Network Exchange (Fabian Bause, Beckhoff)

The same Teams link will be reused for every webinar. A short intro to each webinar will be published in our webinar page. Get in touch if you have a topic you want to suggest or if you have a topic you want to present yourself in a future webinar.

Norwegian Society of Mechatronics (NSOM) had their first general assembly on October 22nd with 12 participants^*. The society was initiated by SFI Offshore Mechatronics alumni Sondre Sanden Tørdal and Daniel Hagen. The purpose is to serve as scientific and social community for people with an educational background and interest in mechatronics. SFI Offshore Mechatronics welcomes this initiative and look forward to various forms of collaboration.
^{*The event took place before the second round of covid-19 restrictions in Norway}

NSOM is formally registered as an association and the general assembly elected the following board: 

Chair of the board
Sondre Sanden Tørdal^* (Postdoctoral Research Fellow UiA, CEO Motiontech)
Co-chair of the board  
Daniel Hagen^* (Researcher UiA, R&D Engineer Red Rock)  
Board members 
Sondre Nordås^* (R&D Engineer MacGregor)  
Morten Hallquist Rudolfsen (Assistant Professor UiA)  
Andreas Klausen (Assistant Professor UiA)  
Philipp Thomas Pasolli (R&D Engineer Macgregor)
_{*SFI Offshore Mechatronics alumni}

The first general assembly also appointed long time mechatronics enthusiast and assistant professor at UiA, Morten Ottestad, as honorary member of the society. Get in touch with NSOM at post@nsom.no and be notified about upcoming events.

The annual progress report from SFI Offshore Mechatronics was submitted on December 1, 2020. The report is available for the partners in ProjectPlace. Some of the highlights from the report are listed below:

Every time a PhD candidate defends his or her thesis is a highlight in SFI Offshore Mechatronics. During 2020 as many as 7 PhD candidates defended their theses. These are:

PhD-2: Andrej Cibicik (NTNU), PhD defense on January 8, 2020, Title: Dynamics of Rigid and Flexible Manipulators Using Screw Theory

PhD-3: Alexander Meyer Sjøberg (NTNU), PhD defense on January 30, 2020, Title: Estimation and Control on Lie Groups based on Formulations on the Lie Algebra

PhD-4: Aksel Sveier (NTNU), PhD defense on February 18, 2020, Title: Quaternions and Dual Quaternions for State and Parameter Estimation

PhD-5: Martin Hemmer (UiA), PhD defense on May 15, 2020, Title: Condition Monitoring Methods for Large, Low-speed Bearings.

PhD-6: Sondre Nordås (UiA), PhD defense April 16, 2020, Title: Using Digital Hydraulics in Secondary Control of Motor Drive.

PhD-7: Geir Ole Tysse (NTNU), PhD defense April 7, 2020, Title: Modeling and Control of Ship-Mounted Cranes.

PhD-8: Daniel Hagen (UiA), PhD defense September 2, 2020, Title: Improving Energy Efficiency and Motion Control in Load-Carrying Applications using Self-Contained Cylinders.

Many of the remaining PhD candidates in the centre are in the final phase of their projects, and a similar number of completions are expected in 2021. During 2020 5 new PhD candidates and 3 Post.Doc’s have started. These are the final positions during the lifetime of the centre.

During 2020 a high percentage of the scientific journal publications were at the highest level (Level 2). As many as 6 of 19 journal articles, or 32%, were at the highest scientific level, see: https://sfi.mechatronics.no/?p=1935

In addition to producing high level scientific research, the centre also has an ambition to produce results relevant for the industry partners. During the remaining time period the centre management will have a continuous focus on achieving examples of innovation with new work processes, services or products in the industry partners. Another goal which will receive focus, together with the new steering board, is the creation of new projects between the partners. The centre SFI Offshore Mechatronics will officially end in 2023.

In 2017, SFI Offshore Mechatronics started using Slack as a collaboration tool. Currently there are 49 members in the Slack group. The Slack group is organized in various channels and each work package has their own channel. Each member can also be reached by direct messaging.  

Slack is an efficient and low barrier way to get in touch with both the center management and the researchers across the different work-packages. We encourage the industry partners to also become members and use this as an opportunity to get in touch and informally discuss relevant topics.  

Most existing members are from the research partners, but we also have some members from the industrial partners. If you are not yet a member you can join by sending an e-mail to sfi@mechatronics.no and ask for access (include your name and company name if you are working in any of the partner companies).

During 2020 the centre has had an election committee working to nominate new members to the steering board from the industrial partners. The election committee consisted of Ann Marchioro from GCE NODE and Charlotte Skourup from ABB. The nominated candidates were presented to the General Assembly on November 12 and after the votes the following new board was formed:

• Tom Fidjeland (GCE NODE), new member of the board and new chairperson
• Morten Halvorsen (NOV), re-elected member of the board and new deputy chairperson
• Sjur Henning Hollekim (MHWirth), re-elected member of the board
• Jisha Panikar (Klueber Lubrication), new member of the board
• Anstein Jorud (Cameron), new deputy member of the board

From the research partners the following members will complete the board:

• Olav Egeland (NTNU)
• Torben Ole Andersen (Aalborg University)
• Geir Grasmo (UiA, in 2021) and Jorun Gislefoss (UiA, in 2022)
• Thomas Meyer (NORCE), deputy member

Olav Egeland, Jorunn Gislefoss and Thomas Meyer will be new board members in SFI Offshore Mechatronics, while Geir Grasmo and Torben Ole Andersen have both served in previous boards.

The centre management would like to give a sincere thank you to the board members who leave in 2020:

• Leif Haukom (GCE NODE), who has been the chairperson since the start of the centre in 2015.
• Eivind Gimming Stensland (MacGregor)
• Øyvind Mydland (StepChange)
• Thor Arne Håverstad (NORCE)
• Houxiang Zhang (NTNU Aalesund)
• Philipp Schubert (RWTH Aachen)

As the annual conference has been moved to next year we have been looking into how to repurpose some of the planned content for the Smart Tools Workshop. We have planned a series of short 30min presentations on topics relevant to SFI Offshore Mechatronics. We are trying to schedule most of the presentations to Thursdays 12.30-13.00 (CET) every two weeks starting on the 8th of October. The following presentations are planned in 2020.

• October 8th: Olav Egeland, NTNU: Rigid-Body Kinematics (note that this presentation starts at 12.15 instead of 12.30)
• October 22nd: Igor Goncharenko, Open Science coordinator at University of Agder: Data management
• November 5th, Asle Pedersen, SFI Offshore Mechatronics: Patent and scholarly search and analysis using Lens.org
• November 19th: Christian Auby, UiA: Why use Docker, Git and Python
• December 3rd: Christian Auby, UiA: How to use Docker, Git and Python

After the formal presentation (12.30-13.00) you are welcome to grab a coffee and stay in the online meeting for a more informal chat and discussion. If we have sufficient attendance and response for the presentations we will continue with the webinars next year. The topics can be research topics or more practical related to research methods, tools or similar. Get in touch if you would like to give a presentation yourself or have a suggestion for topics. All presentations will be announced here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SFI Offshore Mechatronics is committed to follow the FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship. The FAIR principles provide guidelines to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets.

The center is already using Github to publish source code and now we are adopting Dataverse.no to publish datasets. Dataverse.no is hosted by University of Tromsø and is based on the The Dataverse Project, developed by the Dataverse Team at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University.

To publish datasets related to our center, we have secured a sub-respository under the UiA Open Research Data repository (https://dataverse.no/dataverse/mechatronics). Each dataset published to Dataverse gets a unique DOI identifier which can be referenced in scientific publications. We expect that publishing datasets to Dataverse.no will improve reuse of data external to the center but also internally between researchers in the center.

Publishing digital assets and datasets will follow the same internal approval procedures as with scientific publications. If required, datasets can be put under embargo which means that it will not be published before a certain date.

The UiA Library and Open Science coordinators are very helpful and ready to assist with publishing datasets and provide templates and practical guidelines. On October 22nd 12.30-13.00 we will have a webinar with a presentation about data management publishing datasets.

The centre SFI Offshore Mechatronics congratulates MacGregor with their largest single vessel contract to date. The order consists of a mission-critical system to be installed on the OHT offshore wind foundation installation vessel, Alfa Lift.

For more information see https://gcenode.no/news/macgregors-largest-single-vessel-contract

One key sentence from the link above is: “I would also like to add my appreciation of the trust that OHT has placed in MacGregor, and equally recognise the collaborative team effort that has resulted in the innovative monopile installation solution being developed.”

Resources from SFI Offshore Mechatronics were involved in the pre-study leading up to this order, consisting mainly of simulations and development of concepts for the control algorithms. “Trust” is a key word, and by involving resources from the centre, the customer’s trust in the developed solution was increased.

Here is a YouTube video demonstrating the concept: https://youtu.be/GNIwc36eV0w