Andrej Cibicik successfully defended his PhD thesis on January 8, 2020. The title of the thesis was “Dynamics of Rigid and Flexible Manipulators Using Screw Theory”. The evaluation committee consisted of Prof. Joris de Schutter from KU Leuven, Belgium and Dr. Bjørn Skaare from Equinor. The public trial lecture was titled “Vision Systems for Robotic Welding”. The assessment of the trial lecture was: “The candidate held a very good introduction to the topic of vision systems for robotic welding. The presentation was well structured, and built up in a pedagogical way. The candidate covered the motivation, methodology, commercial applications, and technology, and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the methods. The candidate used a broad and appropriate set of references, with a good command of the literature. The candidate has good presentation skills, and showed relevant examples. The candidate spoke excellent English, kept within the time limit, and answered the questions well.”

The thesis itself was evaluated as follows: “The main contribution of the thesis is theoretical: a novel derivation of the dynamic equations and the calculation of the constraint forces for a class of mechanical system with interesting and relevant applications. This contribution is original and the development of the theoretical framework and the presentation in the thesis is of high quality. The work has the potential to become a reference for modelling dynamics of mechanical systems. The use of the framework has been demonstrated for analyzing the constraint forces in offshore cranes.”