A minimalistic approach to appearance-based visual SLAM

This paper presents a vision-based approach to SLAM in indoor / outdoor environments with minimalistic sensing and computational requirements. The approach is based on a graph representation of robot poses, using a relaxation algorithm to obtain a globally consistent map. Each link corresponds to a relative measurement of the spatial relation between the two nodes it connects. The links describe the likelihood distribution of the relative pose as a Gaussian distribution. To estimate the covariance matrix for links obtained from an omni-directional vision sensor, a novel method is introduced based on the relative similarity of neighbouring images. This new method does not require determining distances to image features using multiple view geometry, for example. Combined indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrate that the approach can handle qualitatively different environments (without modification of the parameters), that it can cope with violations of the “flat floor assumption” to some degree, and that it scales well with increasing size of the environment, producing topologically correct and geometrically accurate maps at low computational cost. Further experiments demonstrate that the approach is also suitable for combining multiple overlapping maps, e.g. for solving the multi-robot SLAM problem with unknown initial poses

Control of MTDC Transmission Systems under Local Information

High-voltage direct current (HVDC) is a commonly used technology for long-distance electric power transmission, mainly due to its low resistive losses. In this paper a distributed controller for multi-terminal high-voltage direct current (MTDC) transmission systems is considered. Sufficient conditions for when the proposed controller renders the closed-loop system asymptotically stable are provided. Provided that the closed loop system is asymptotically stable, it is shown that in steady-state a weighted average of the deviations from the nominal voltages is zero. Furthermore, a quadratic cost of the current injections is minimized asymptotically

Distributed PI-Control with Applications to Power Systems Frequency Control

This paper considers a distributed PI-controller for networked dynamical systems. Sufficient conditions for when the controller is able to stabilize a general linear system and eliminate static control errors are presented. The proposed controller is applied to frequency control of power transmission systems. Sufficient stability criteria are derived, and it is shown that the controller parameters can always be chosen so that the frequencies in the closed loop converge to nominal operational frequency. We show that the load sharing property of the generators is maintained, i.e., the input power of the generators is proportional to a controller parameter. The controller is evaluated by simulation on the IEEE 30 bus test network, where its effectiveness is demonstrated

Distributed Voltage and Current Control of Multi-Terminal High-Voltage Direct Current Transmission Systems

High-voltage direct current (HVDC) is a commonly used technology for long-distance power transmission, due to its low resistive losses and low costs. In this paper, a novel distributed controller for multi-terminal HVDC (MTDC) systems is proposed. Under certain conditions on the controller gains, it is shown to stabilize the MTDC system. The controller is shown to always keep the voltages close to the nominal voltage, while assuring that the injected power is shared fairly among the converters. The theoretical results are validated by simulations, where the affect of communication time-delays is also studied

Hur kan producentkooperativa företag utforma sina nyckeltal så att de är anpassade till företagets vision och styrelsens intressen? - en fallstudie av Skånemejerier

Syftet med uppsatsen är att utforma en teoretisk nyckeltalsmodell som är lämplig att använda i ett producentkooperativ och som är anpassade för företagets vision och styrelsens intressen. Detta utför vi med hjälp av en fallstudie då vi valt ett kvalitativt och abduktivt angreppssätt. För insamling av empiri har vi i vårt fallföretag utfört djupintervjuer. De teorier vi valt att arbeta med är; agentteorin, nyckeltal, Balanced Scorecard samt producentkooperativ. Resultatet av vår insamlade empiri och den teori vi valt att fokusera på har mynnat ut i att vi har konstruerat ett Balanced Scorecard anpassat till ett producentkooperativ vilket underlättar uppföljningen mellan ledning och styrelse

Distributed Controllers for Multi-Terminal HVDC Transmission Systems

High-voltage direct current (HVDC) is an increasingly commonly used technology for long-distance electric power transmission, mainly due to its low resistive losses. In this paper the voltage-droop method (VDM) is reviewed, and three novel distributed controllers for multi-terminal HVDC (MTDC) transmission systems are proposed. Sufficient conditions for when the proposed controllers render the equilibrium of the closed-loop system asymptotically stable are provided. These conditions give insight into suitable controller architecture, e.g., that the communication graph should be identical with the graph of the MTDC system, including edge weights. Provided that the equilibria of the closed-loop systems are asymptotically stable, it is shown that the voltages asymptotically converge to within predefined bounds. Furthermore, a quadratic cost of the injected currents is asymptotically minimized. The proposed controllers are evaluated on a four-bus MTDC system.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1406.5839, arXiv:1311.514

Lidar-level localization with radar? The CFEAR approach to accurate, fast and robust large-scale radar odometry in diverse environments

This paper presents an accurate, highly efficient, and learning-free method for large-scale odometry estimation using spinning radar, empirically found to generalize well across very diverse environments -- outdoors, from urban to woodland, and indoors in warehouses and mines - without changing parameters. Our method integrates motion compensation within a sweep with one-to-many scan registration that minimizes distances between nearby oriented surface points and mitigates outliers with a robust loss function. Extending our previous approach CFEAR, we present an in-depth investigation on a wider range of data sets, quantifying the importance of filtering, resolution, registration cost and loss functions, keyframe history, and motion compensation. We present a new solving strategy and configuration that overcomes previous issues with sparsity and bias, and improves our state-of-the-art by 38%, thus, surprisingly, outperforming radar SLAM and approaching lidar SLAM. The most accurate configuration achieves 1.09% error at 5Hz on the Oxford benchmark, and the fastest achieves 1.79% error at 160Hz.Comment: Accepted for publication in Transactions on Robotics. Edited 2022-11-07: Updated affiliation and citatio