Geir Ole Tysse defended his PhD thesis at NTNU on August 11, 2020. The opponents were Professor Oliver Sawodny from the University of Stuttgart in Germany and Professor Jing Zhou from the University of Agder. The title of the thesis was “Modeling and Control of Ship-mounted Cranes”.

The trial lecture was on the topic of “control of robots with arm elasticities” and parts of the assessment were: “The candidate gave a very good overview over the state-of-the-art methods of control of robots with arm elasticities. He focused on methods mainly related to differential geometry. He gave good explanations of the main approaches and gave a very good overview over the theoretical and mathematical methods”.

The candidate made important achievements in modelling of ship cranes and load dynamics, in combination with wave excitation. He made important contributions in controlling the crane payload. As part of achieving this, he developed new methods to estimate the effective cable length. He developed a new method of combining MPC approach to the position in outer loop with a Lyapunov-based oscillation damping controller in the inner loop. He showed the efficiency of this approach in several experiments at a test bed developed at NTNU, as well as in simulations.

The entire PhD thesis is made available in ProjectPlace (WP0 – Publications – PhD Theses) for partners in the centre.