Project period extended to September 30th

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

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

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.

Accepted Scientific Publications 2023

Note: Link to full text either OA = Open Access or PP = ProjectPlace for consortium partners only

Journal Papers:

[1] Yousri, Mohamed & Jacobs, Georg & Neumann, Stephan. Effect of Electrification on the Quantitative Reliability of an Offshore Crane Winch in Terms of Drive-Induced Torque Ripples. Modeling, Identification and Control (MIC). Vol 44, No 1, pp. 1-16, 2023. [OA]

[2] Viswanathan, Savin & Holden, Christian & Egeland, Olav & Sten, Ronny. (2023). Cosimulation of a direct-acting riser-tensioner system – validation with field measurements and sample simulations. Ocean Engineering. 276. 114241. [OA]

[3] Thomas Farsakoglou, Henrik C. Pedersen, Morten K. Ebbesen, Torben O. Andersen. Improving Energy Efficiency and Response Time of an Offshore Winch Drive with Digital Displacement Motors. MIC Journal Modeling, Identification, and Control. Accepted.

[4] Wei Zhao, Mohit Bhola, Morten Kjeld Ebbesen, and Torben Ole Andersen. A Novel Control Design for Realizing Passive Load-Holding Function on a Two-Motor-Two-Pump Speed-Controlled Hydraulic Cylinder. MIC Journal Modeling, Identification, and Control. Accepted

[5] B. Zaman, L. M. Lopez-Ramos, B. Beferull-Lozano. Online Joint Topology Identification and Signal Estimation from Streams with Missing Data. IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks, 2023. (Level 2). Accepted

Conference Papers:

[1] José Amendola, Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi, and Ajit Jha. Embedding Clustering using Lightweight Contrastive Learning For Cross-Modal Classification. The 8th IEEE International Conference on Computer and Communication Systems (IEEE ICCCS2023), Guangzhou, China on April 21-24, 2023.

[2] Høeg, Sigmund Hennum and Lars Tingelstad. More Than Eleven Thousand Words: Towards Using Language Models for Robotic Sorting of Unseen Objects into Arbitrary Categories. Workshop on Language and Robot Learning, CoRL 2022 ; Auckland. 2022-12-14 – 2022-12-18.

[3] Wei Zhao, Mohit Bhola, Morten Kjeld Ebbesen, and Torben Ole Andersen. A Motor-Controlled Hydraulic Cylinder With Cylinder Pressure Control And Load-Holding Function – An Experimental Study. ASME/BATH Symposium on Fluid Power and Motion Control, FPMC2023, October 16-18 2023, Sarasota, USA

[4] Mohit Bhola, Torben O. Andersen, Morten K. Ebbesen. Design Of Novel Closed-Circuit Hydrostatic Transmission Without Charge Pump. ASME/BATH Symposium on Fluid Power and Motion Control, FPMC2023, October 16-18 2023, Sarasota, USA

[5] Wei Zhao, Mohit Bhola. Comparing Compact and Remote Deployments of a Speed-Controlled Cylinder Power Unit on an Offshore Knuckle Boom Crane. Scandinavian International Conference on Fluid Power (SICFP) 2023, May 30 – June 1 2023, Tampere, Finland