PhD Defence by Tobias Stenbock Andersen

Abstract

Deploying autonomous systems from a safe and controlled laboratory environment into real-life scenarios is difficult and time-consuming. This issue stems from the difference between the laboratory and the deployment environment. This thesis explores how rapid deployment of autonomous systems can be achieved by closing the gap between laboratory and deployment environment. The thesis findings suggest that the gap can be addressed by creating robust and adaptive autonomous systems and that a focus should be placed on developing simple systems and conducting extensive testing to achieve these kinds of systems. The findings have been discovered by participating in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020 and 2024. In the MBZIRC, the participating autonomous systems must be built in the home laboratory and deployed in Abu Dhabi. This created a strong need for rapid deployment in the systems and a unique opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of the system's deployment. The participating systems designed during this project achieved good performance in the competitions, proving the effectiveness of the methods explained in the thesis. The lessons from the project have been condensed into a three- step process, which allows other developers to extract the methods discovered by this thesis and guide them towards a rapid deployment-focused approach.

Supervisors

• Principal supervisor: Associate professor Matteo Fumagalli, Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU
• Co-supervisor: Professor Nils Axel Andersen, Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU
• Co-supervisor: Professor Ole Ravn, Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU

Evaluation Board

• Professor Lazaros Nalpantidis Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU
• Professor George Nikolakopoulos, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden
• Professor Erdal Kayacan, Paderborn University, Germany

Master of the Ceremony

• Associate Professor Søren Hansen, Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU