The aim of this paper is to present results from a study examining the relation between the educational background and professional roles with engineers engaged in product development. Derived from previous studies, the product development engineer ought to be a multifaceted engineer, knowledgeable and skilled in several fields. This engineer should work interdisciplinary, integrative and with the aim to be creative and innovative. By using a substantial data set consisting of 300 engineers in Swedish product development organizations, we derive some important research propositions. The data shows that there are correlations between organizational responsibilities and educational program, in particular regarding focus on design, system integration, project management and technical coordination. If we want to understand how the engineering education affects the professional role of an engineer; we believe that it is critical to further investigate the developed propositions. One example is mechanical engineers; the data shows that the studied mechanical engineers rarely work with design. Our proposition is therefore to investigate the identity and legitimacy of these programs to further clarify the professional role.

Efficient engineering design and development of high precision and reliable surgical simulators, like haptic devices for surgical training benefits from model-based and simulation driven design. The complexity of the design space, multi-domains, multicriteria requirements and multi-physics character of the behavior of such a product ask for a model based systematic approach for creating and validating compact and computationally efficient simulation models to be used for the design process.The research presented in this thesis describes a model-based design approach towards the design of haptic devices for simulation of surgical procedures, in case of hard tissues such as bone or teeth milling. The proposed approach is applied to a new haptic device based on TAU configuration.The main contributions of this thesis are:

• Development and verification of kinematic and dynamic models of the TAU haptic device.
• Multi-objective optimization (MOO) approach for optimum design of the TAU haptic device by optimizing kinematic performance indices, like workspace volume, kinematic isotropy and torque requirement of actuators.
•  A methodology for creating an analytical and compact model of the quasi-static stiffness of haptic devices, which considers the stiffness of; actuation system;flexible links and passive joints.

Efficient development and engineering of high performing interactive devices, such as haptic robots for surgical training benefits from model-based and simulation-driven design. The complexity of the design space and the multi-domain and multi-physics character of the behavior of such a product ask for a systematic methodology for creating and validating compact and computationally efficient simulation models to be used in the design process. Modeling the quasi-static stiffness is an important first step before optimizing the mechanical structure, engineering the control system, and performing hardware in the loop tests. The stiffness depends not only on the stiffness of the links, but also on the contact stiffness in each joint. A fine-granular Finite element method (FEM) model, which is the most straightforward approach, cannot, due to the model size and simulation complexity, efficiently be used to address such tasks. In this work, a new methodology for creating an analytical and compact model of the quasi-static stiffness of a haptic device is proposed, which considers the stiffness of actuation systems, flexible links and passive joints. For the modeling of passive joints, a hertzian contact model is introduced for both spherical and universal joints, and a simply supported beam model for universal joints. The validation process is presented as a systematic guideline to evaluate the stiffness parameters both using parametric FEM modeling and physical experiments. Preloading has been used to consider the clearances and possible assembling errors during manufacturing. A modified JP Merlet kinematic structure is used to exemplify the modeling and validation methodology.

This paper presents the kinematics and dynamics modeling of a novel hybrid kinematic concept, i.e. the TAU haptic device. This new concept was obtained from the modification of TAU-2 structure proposed by Khan et al. First a kinematic model for inverse and forward kinematics was developed and analyzed. Then an algorithm to solve the close form inverse dynamics is presented using Lagrangian formulation. Numerical simulation was carried out to examine the validity of the approach and accuracy of the technique employed. A trigonometric helical trajectory of 5^th order spline was developed in Cartesian space for each degree of freedom of the moving platform in order to verify and simulate the inverse dynamics; the motion of the platform is such that the tool centre point remains on this trajectory while its orientation is changing constantly in roll, pitch and yaw.

In our modern society, the usage of robotic arms are increasing. Much of the

work in the industry is now done by robots. Even though they are able to do

very precise work, difficulties appear when trying to do some of the tasks that

humans do. This can be changed by making it easy for a human to control the

robotic arm and to "teach it" how it’s done.

The purpose of this project is to develop a robotic arm that is easily controlled

by the user. This is done by using the users own arm movement to

control the robot. To make the usage more intuitive, a simple haptic feedback

system will be implemented. This creates a greater experience where the user

is able to "feel what the robot feels". To be able to create such a system,

development of an easy control unit, robotic arm and feedback system has to

be made. The steering of the robotic arm is created from reading the user’s

arm movement with potentiometers, and mapping these values to servos on

the robotic arm. Sensors on the robotic claw and on the user’s hand makes it

possible for a DC motor to create a counter torque that gives a feel for the size

of the object being lifted.

The feedback system seemed to improve the overall experience of using a

robotic arm and with further work, today’s robotic industry could be improved.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Scania are entering the GCDC 2011 under the name Scoop –Stockholm Cooperative Driving. This paper is an introduction to their team and to the technical approach theyare using in their prototype system for GCDC 2011.

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems have been widely used during the last decades delivering excellent results for the power network operation and management. However, some current customer requirements are for SCADA systems to integrate external components in order to perform advanced power network studies and develop both existing and new business processes. This novel viewpoint will make these systems evolve from a monolithic infrastructure towards a loosely coupled and flexible architecture. Hence, new needs have arisen with the aim of improving the system interoperability, reducing the complexity and enhancing the maintainability. This master´s thesis project presents an Interoperability Prediction Framework (IPF), that supports the architecture design process during the early stages of product development. In addition, this work has also investigated some alternative architectures, which have been modelled and verified using the previously mentioned framework. A first conceptual architecture has been designed to improve the internal system interoperability, reducing the coupling between the basic SCADA and the Energy Management System (EMS). Later, a second architecture that allows the integration of external components has been introduced to promote the external interoperability. Results show that the proposed architectures are correct (according to the IPF) and the interoperability of the system is improved. Furthermore, initial conclusions suggest that the final proposed solution would be less complex than the current architecture in the long term, although a large effort and substantial changes would be needed to upgrade the system architecture.

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)-centric cyber physical systems often contain software and hardware elements with life-spans shorter than the systems' intended life-span. Various studies have examined hardware obsolescence, although in most systems, software costs contribute as much, or more, to the total life cycle costs than hardware. The aim of our research effort is to explore, synthesize, and compile past research efforts on obsolescence in the context of COTS-based systems, and propose new ways to overcome related issues. This research effort suggests the need for systematic perspectives to streamline potentially overbearing acquisition processes while focusing on core critical aspects affecting systems sustainment and cost. Significant life cycle costs associated with obsolescence mitigation approaches, therefore, programmatic strategic planning should be adapted to include the context of obsolescence with the objective to improve the efficiency of new COTS-intensive CPS systems with enduring perspectives. The study reveals opportunities and challenges for obsolescence in COTS-based CPSs.

Tennis is a popular sport and in summer it’s often played outside. When an outdoors tennis court has been used it needs to be brushed. First the whole court is brushed witha large brush and then the white lines with a smaller brush. The aim of this thesis was to design and build a working prototype of a robot who can do all of this by itself i.e sweep the court and then the white lines. The budget for components to the prototype was limited to 1 000 SEK. Tools and other resources such as 3D-printers, soldering equipment and laser cutters was provided by KTH for free. First information and inspiration about self-driving cars and driving patterns was collected and some important sources were old bachelor’s thesis. Then, needed components and dimensions could be determined. In this project the main components were an Arduino Uno, two DC motors, an L298H-bridge, an ultra sonic distance sensor, an on/off switch, AAA batteries and a 9 V battery. The conclusions that could been drawn was that the robot can work good enough to sweep a court with only a preprogrammed path. However, to sweep the white lines, sensors would be necessary. It could also be concluded that a robot could sweep the court at the same speed as two people could do it.

Automatic parking systems are intended to save a lot ofspace and create a more favourable parking experience. In this thesis the main goal was to create a functional and user-friendly rotary parking system. The system consistsof a framework, DC-motor, driveline, ultrasonic distance sensor and platforms. Most of the construction consists of plastic, the remaining parts are made of metal. The system was evaluated using two experiments, one that measured the speed of the system and the other one measuring the level of accuracy. After the first experiment, it was concluded that the system works well for the corresponding speed. The second experiment showed that improvements of the accuracy can be made.

Buoys anchored to the seabed are often used for marking courses in competitive sailing and other water sports, but they may need to be relocated several times per day. To avoid the time and fuel consuming labour of raising and moving the anchors, a prototype of an autonomous buoy using electric motors to maintain its position was built and tested. The prototype buoy was built as a catamaran pontoon boat with one motor in each hull. To navigate it used a Global Navigation Satellite Systems receiver and a compass as sensors. Based on information from the sensors, a microcontroller regulated the buoy’s heading and velocity using proportional, integral and derivative control. The prototype was tested and evaluated in terms of design suitability, control system performance and dynamic positional precision. Except for leaking propeller axle seals the general design of the buoy was found suitable, as was the PID control system. However, while the GNSS position was sufficiently accurate when stationary, it would not register movement smaller than approximately 30 m. Consequently the buoy was only able to stay within 19.8 m of the target location on average. The performance maybe improved by either using a different GNSS receiver, or upgrading to Real Time Kinematics GNSS.

This bachelor’s thesis aimed to create a self balancing monowheel, a vehicle type consisting of one wheel, using a PID controller. The wheel is equipped with an accelerometer to gather data about the tilt of the construction, which is then filtered using a Kalman filter. A DC motor is propelling the monowheel forward whereas a stepper motor with a battery pack attached will actively balance the wheel with the help of a PID-controller. This method of balancing had limited success allowing the vehicle to travel for up to 7 seconds before falling over, compared with up to 4 seconds with no balancing implemented.

Pitcher is a prototype which makes it easier for inexperienced guitar players to tune their guitars without any prior knowledge required. This thesis will explore how the construction varies between the usage of DC and a stepper motor, how reliable the tuner is and how long it takes to tune the guitar. The tuner will capture sound with a microphone and calculate the current frequency of the string with YIN autocorrelation. Based on the frequency a control system regulator is used to determine the speed and direction of a motor which turns the tuning peg, this is repeated until the string is in tune. 30 tests were conducted from different starting frequencies, and the time it took for the tuner to find the right pitch and the string’s corresponding frequency was measured. Some of the measurements were a couple of Hz off pitch, and only about half of the frequencies measured belonged to the interval where there is no noticeable dierence of the pitch, therefore the tuner could not be considered reliable. The time it takes to tune the guitar is dependent on how far off pitch the string is andthe dierence in time does not depend linearly with the starting frequency, it increases faster the further off pitch the string is.The tuner is portable and to apply the tuner to the guitar it is held and placed on the tuning peg with one hand as the other hand is plucking the string.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis was to discover how an articulated vehicle can park itself using a pre-defined parking path with a combination of ultrasonic sensors as well as a rotary angle sensor.

The project was divided into two parts: constructing a small scale demonstrator and the software controlling the demonstrator. The demonstrator was constructed from offthe- shelf components and custom parts. The truck was designed based on a rear wheel driven truck with Ackermann steering. The localization of a parking spot and measuring other distances was done with ultrasonic sensors and the hitch angle was measured by a rotary angle sensor.

The performance of the demonstrator was evaluated by measuring the trailers angle difference from the center line of the parking spot.

The performance was deemed to be reasonably good with successful parkings in 8 out of 10 attempts.

With the market for autonomous home assistants steadily growing, reasons for the development of new ways of communicating with the robot assistants have emerged. This thesis aims to develop a system wherein a human can draw instructions for the robot to interpret and follow or perform. An autonomous robot based on an Arduino board was built. Software for pattern recognition through a camera was developed and tested for precision and efficiency.

The device was able to read a command drawn on a sheet of paper by the user, analyze it to extract a route for the four wheeled robot to follow and transmit operations wirelessly via Bluetooth. The intent was not to create a marketable product, but rather to build a proof of concept for a viable alternative to existing communication systems for home assistants.

The resulting product was able to interact with a human operator, ask it to circle an area to sweep and successfully do as commanded. When the camera captured what had been drawn the system needed 70 seconds to sweep an area of 0.8m2. Errors for forward motion and rotation were calculated to 2% - 3.5% and 0.98% - 0.99% respectively.

Nearly 1.3 million people die each year in traffic-related accidents, whereas an additional 20-50 million peopleare injured. Introducing autonomous vehicles would aim to reduce these numbers by removing the driver from the loop entirely, and thus removing the human error. Intersections are considered a complex traffic situation for autonomous vehicles. Functions which could accurately foresee future events in those situations, mimicking the situation awareness of humans, would improve autonomous systems and increase traffic safety. To address this a system is designed with two main functionalities: estimate the movements of observed vehicles in a general traffic situation and predict the probability of a collision, given the current ego trajectory. This system could either be used as information and feedback for a trajectoryplanner or as support for decision making at higher level system  monitoring. The main contributions are the robust system design, that robustly and consistently estimates the likelihood of a collision and thus preventing future collision, and the intention estimation which determines the probability of which route through an intersection an observed vehicle will take through an intersection by using its current state. The system is validated by controlling the ego vehicle’s velocity with a Velocity Planning Controller to avoid colliding. It is shown that in terms of robustness to noise the system successfully avoids collision.

Braille is a writing system that uses tactile dots in a predetermined order which, in relation to each other, represent different letters in the alphabet. This writing system makes it possible for people with visual impairments to take part of the written media. But the availability of home based braille printers is limited and these printers are often expensive. The purpose of this project is to investigate if it is possible to build a home based braille printer for a low cost using microcontrollers, and thereby making it more accessible to people with visual impairment. In order to achieve this, a prototype was built using an microcontroller together with stepper motors and a solenoid. These components were then controlled by code through user input and translated to required movements. Each switch case then calls a set of functions that activates the steppers and the solenoid in the order needed to get the desired character. In the time frame given, the project resulted in a prototype able to print out the input it was given. As for the cost of building your own Braille printer in comparison to buying one on the market highly depends on what processing machines are accessible.

Advanced functionalities unthinkable a few decades ago are now being introduced into automotive vehicles through embedded systems for reasons like emission control, vehicle connectivity, safety and cooperative behaviors. As the development often involves stakeholders from different engineering disciplines and organizations, the complexity due to shared requirements, interdependencies of data, functions, and resources, as well as tight constraints in regards to timing, safety, and resource efficiency makes the system integration, quality control and assurance, reuse and change management increasingly more difficult. This calls for a more rigorous approach to the development of automotive embedded systems and components. This paper describes the CESAR reference technology platform (RTP) that supports the formalization of various engineering concerns in the development of safety-relevant embedded systems and thereby a model-based integration of various tools and methods to form seamless environments or toolchains for the development of such systems. 

Tool integration is a key factor for improving development efficiency and product quality during the development of safety-relevant embedded systems. We present in this work a demonstrator based on the most recent outcomes of the CESAR project. The proposed integrated tool-chain aims at better linking development activities together, thus improving traceability during requirements engineering, system design, safety analysis and V&V activities using a model-based development approach. We analyze the proposed tool-chain from three different points of view: (1) tool integrator, (2) technology provider, and (3) end-user. These different points of view enable the description of the different technologies used at the different levels and the analysis of the benefits for the end-user.

The embedded safety-critical system design and development industries are facing ever-increasing demands regarding the variety and flexibility of systems and devices from society. At a technical level, these demands result in more and more complex solutions that, at the same time, need to abide by stringent regulatory requirements and economic challenges, such as cost, performance and time to market.  

Advanced functionalities unthinkable a few decades ago are now being introduced into automotive vehicles through embedded systems for reasons like emission control, vehicle connectivity, safety and cooperative behaviors. As the development often involves stakeholders from different engineering disciplines and organizations, the complexity due to shared requirements, interdependencies of data, functions, and resources, as well as tight constraints in regards to timing, safety, and resource efficiency makes the system integration, quality control and assurance, reuse and change management increasingly more difficult. This calls for a more rigorous approach to the development of automotive embedded systems and components. This paper describes the CESAR reference technology platform (RTP) that supports the formalization of various engineering concerns in the development of safety-relevant embedded systems and thereby a model-based integration of various tools and methods to form seamless environments or toolchains for the development of such systems.

Today’s society is facing a large increase of automation and smart devices. Everything from coffee machines to fridges include some kind of electronics and embedded systems. The focus of this Bachelor’s thesis was to dive deeper into how these automated devices can be controlled and more specifically a robot arm. The main purpose revolved around constructing a robotic arm that could be controlled through three different methods using MATLAB. These three were manual control, numerical analysis control and with a neural network based control. The prototype was created by assembling six servo motors onto 3D-printed parts. The arm consisted of three main parts which were a base, an arm and a gripper. The system was controlled by an Arduino micro-controller connected to a computer. The results show that the manual control method was easy to implement, fast and reliable. It allows control of all the angels for each servo motor, which also means controlling each individual degree of freedom. The numerical way, using Newton-Raphson’s method, broadened the abilities to control the arm but was slower. The third and final solution was to use fuzzy-logic. This ended up being a powerful method allowing for great control with low latency. While unreliable, the method showed great potential and with refinement could surpass the others. The conclusion was that the neural network method was the overall best method for controlling and manoeuvring the robot arm using MATLAB.

The inherited rotation in a caster wheel allows movement in any direction, but pays at the expense of reaction torques. When implemented in a mobile robot, these forces have a negative impact in its performance. One approach is to restrict rotations on the spot by attaching a filter to the output of the motion planner. However, this formulation compromises the navigation’s completion in critical scenarios, such as parking, taking curves in narrow corridors or navigating at the presence of a high density of obstacles. Therefore, in this thesis we consider the influence of caster wheels in the motion planning stage, commonly presented as local planning.

This work proposes a Model Predictive Control (MPC) based local planner that integrates the caster wheel physics into the motion planning stage. A caster wheel aware term is combined with a reference tracking based navigation, which leads to the formulation of the Caster Wheel Aware Local Planner (CWAWLP). Since this method requires knowing the caster wheel’s state and there is no sensor that provides this information, a caster wheel state observer is also formulated.

In order to evaluate the impact of the caster wheel aware term, CWAWLP is compared to a Caster Wheel based Agnostic Local Planner (CWAGLP) and a Caster Wheel based Agnostic Planner Local Planner with Path Filter (CWPFLP). After running simulations for three case studies in a virtual framework, two experimental case studies are conducted in an intra-logistics robot. These are evaluated according to the navigation’s quality, motor torque usage and energy consumption.

According to the patterns observed in the evaluation, CWAWLP covers a longer distance than CWAGLP wihout decreasing the navigation’s quality. At the same time, its motor torques are similar to the ones of CWPFLP. Therefore, CWAWLP is capable of considering caster wheel physics without sacrificing navigation capabilities. The formulated caster wheel aware term is compatible with any MPC based navigation algorithm and inherits the derivation of an observer capable of estimating caster wheel rotation angles and rolling speeds. Even if the caster wheel awareness has been implemented in a differential driven robot, this approach is also applicable to vehicles with an alternative drivetrain, such as car-like robots.

Context: Exploratory Testing (ET) is a manual approach to software testing in which learning, test design and test execution occurs simultaneously. Still a developing topic of interest to academia, although as yet insufficiently investigated, most studies focus on the skills and experience of the individual tester. However, contextual factors such as project processes, test scope and organisational boundaries are also likely to affect the approach.

Objective: This study explores contextual differences between teams of testers at a MedTec firm developing safety-critical products to ascertain whether contextual factors can influence the outcomes of ET, and what associated implications can be drawn for test management.

Method: A development project was studied in two iterations, each consisting of a quantitative phase testing hypotheses concerning when ET would identify faults in comparison to other testing approaches and a qualitative phase involving interviews.

Results: Influence on ET is traced to how the scope of tests focus learning on different types of knowledge and imply an asymmetry in the strength and number of information flows to test teams.

Conclusions: While test specialisation can be attractive to software development organisations, results suggest changes to processes and organisational structures might be required to maintain test efficiency throughout projects: the responsibility for test cases might need to be rotated late in projects, and asymmetries in information flows might require management to actively strengthen the presence and connections of test teams throughout the firm. However, further research is needed to investigate whether these results also hold for non safety-critical faults.

The increasing complexity and size of modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has led to a sharp decline in productivity among CPS designers. Requirements on safety aggravate this problem further, both by being difficult to ensure and due to their high importance to the public.

Tools, or rather efforts to facilitate the automation of development processes, are a central ingredient in many of the proposed innovations to mitigate this problem. Even though the safety-related implications of introducing automation in development processes have not been extensively studied, it is known that automation has already had a large impact on operational systems. If tools are to play a part in mitigating the increase in safety-critical CPS complexity, then their actual impact on CPS development, and thereby the safety of the corresponding end products, must be sufficiently understood.

An survey of relevant research fields, such as system safety, software engineering and tool integration, is provided to facilitate the discussion on safety-related implications of tool usage. Based on the identification of industrial safety standards as an important source of information and considering that the risks posed by separate tools have been given considerable attention in the transportation domain, several high-profile safety standards in this domain have been surveyed. According to the surveyed standards, automation should primarily be evaluated on its reliable execution of separate process steps independent of human operators. Automation that only supports the actions of operators during CPS development is viewed as relatively inconsequential.

A conceptual model and a reference model have been created based on the surveyed research fields. The former defines the entities and relationships most relevant to safety-related risks associated with tool usage. The latter describes aspects of tool integration and how these relate to each other. By combining these models, a risk analysis could be performed and properties of tool chains which need to be ensured to mitigate risk identified. Ten such safety-related characteristics of tool chains are described.

These safety-related characteristics provide a systematic way to narrow down what to look for with regard to tool usage and risk. The hypothesis that a large set of factors related to tool usage may introduce risk could thus be tested through an empirical study, which identified safety-related weaknesses in support environments tied both to high and low levels of automation. The conclusion is that a broader perspective, which includes more factors related to tool usage than those considered by the surveyed standards, will be needed.

Three possible reasons to disregard such a broad perspective have been refuted, namely requirements on development processes enforced by the domain of CPS itself, certain characteristics of safety-critical CPS and the possibility to place trust in a proven, manual development process. After finding no strong reason to keep a narrow perspective on tool usage, arguments are put forward as to why the future evolution of support environments may actually increase the importance of such a broad perspective.

Suggestions for how to update the mental models of the surveyed safety standards, and other standards like them, are put forward based on this identified need for a broader perspective.

In this report I detail a System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) hazard analysis of the tool integration of development environments for embedded systems. Building on results from previous studies I generalize and expand on earlier findings regarding the relationship between safety and tool integration.

To prepare for the analysis I customized STPA for the context of tool integration. This customization allowed me to subsequently design and analyze three versions of a tool chain originally provided by an industrial partner. A net result of 85, 98 and 73 risks was identified, in comparison to 25 integration weaknesses identified through expert knowledge. The design of the different versions of the tool chain and a comparison of the identified risks with the integration weaknesses allowed me to validate the usefulness of STPA for both identifying and correctly categorizing risks and causes in the context of tool integration. An analysis of my results also points out the fact that STPA is not a silver bullet, without enough expertise it is easy to omit important parts of process models and thus arrive at incomplete conclusions.

In regard to the relationship between safety and tool integration nine properties were identified, properties that need to be supported correctly to avoid hazards in the context of tool integration. These properties require support throughout a noticeable part of a development environment to have an impact and derive much of that impact from the possibility to centralize them. They also interrelate, so that often several of them need to be handled to mitigate one type of risk. However, introducing support for them across a whole development environment is likely to be costly, or even impossible. Furthermore, introducing support for these properties will mitigate some risks, but also create other risks at higher levels of organization.

These properties therefore point to the size a development environment, the number of contexts towards which the development environment can be verified and the effort required to ensure the added requirements at higher levels of organization as deciding factors on whether the effort to support them should be made (other efforts, more efficient in those particular cases, could otherwise be considered). The existence of these properties also point to the possibility of developing and pre-qualifying tools and tool chains based on the assumption that some or all of these properties will be supported by the final development environment. This could potentially lower, or at least distribute, the cost of the final qualification.

High profile systemic safety standards for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) development within the transportation domain have commonalities with regard to their view of the safety-related implications of tool usage. Their guidelines on tool qualification favor a bottom-up approach in which tools are dealt with in isolation and mostly if they may directly introduce faults into end products. This guidance may ignore risk introduced by the integration of software tools, especially if these risks are related to low levels of automation - such as process notifications and improper graphical user interfaces. This paper presents a study that ties weaknesses in support environments to software faults. Based on the observed weaknesses guidelines for a top-down software tool chain qualification are suggested for inclusion in the next generation of safety standards. This has implications not only for the surveyed standards in the transportation domain, but also for other standards for safety-critical CPS development that do not include a broader view on risks related to tool usage. Furthermore, given the type of omission identified in the surveyed standards, it is suggested that researchers interested in the safety-related implications of tool integration should approach organizational research in search of possibilities to set up theory triangulation studies.

The increasing complexity of embedded systems development is becoming difficult to handle with development environments based on disjoint engineering tools. Support for interactions between various engineering tools, especially through automated means, has therefore received an increased amount of attention during the last few years. The subsequent increase in the amount of tool integration is leading to an increased impact of tool integration on non-functional properties of development efforts, development environments and end products. At the same time there is a lack of methods and tools for analysing the relationship between these properties and tool integration. To establish a foundation for analysing this generic relationship, the specific relationship between tool integration and the safety of end products is analysed in this thesis.

A survey was conducted to analyze the State of the Art of tool integration as related to safety. This survey specifically identified the lack of an efficient handling of tool integration by modern safety standards as an important concern. In relation to this survey, three theories were identified as of specific importance. These are the school of thought known as Systems Thinking, the Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) causality model and the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) hazard analysis technique.

Building on these theories, this thesis provides original contributions intended to (1) describe concepts and models related to tool integration and safety (the first and second contribution), (2) link tool integration to safety in a way that reduces complexity during analysis (the third contribution) and (3) propose how to interpret and make use of the implications of the presented theories and the first three contributions (the fourth and fifth contribution).

• The first contribution is a new conceptual model of a development effort that emphasizes tool integration.

• The second contribution is a new reference model for tool integration in highly heterogeneous environments.

• The third contribution consists of nine safety-related tool chain properties, i.e. properties of tool chains that could mitigate at least part of the risks introduced by tool integration.

• The fourth contribution is a proposition on how to identify safety implications due to a high level of automation of tool integration.

• The fifth contribution is a proposition for a new software tool qualification process.

The typical development environment today consists of many specialized development tools, which are partially integrated, forming a complex tool landscape with partial integration. Traditional approaches for reasoning about tool integration are insufficient to measure the degree of integration and integration optimality in today’s complex tool landscape. This paper presents a reference model that introduces dependencies between, and metrics for, integration aspects to overcome this problem. This model is used to conceive a method for reasoning about tool integration and identify improvements in an industrial case study. Based on this we are able to conclude that our reference model does not detract value from the principles that it is based on, instead it highlights improvements that were not well visible earlier. We conclude the paper by discussing open issues for our reference model, namely if it is suitable to use during the creation of new systems, if the used integration aspects can be subdivided further to support the analysis of secondary issues related to integration, difficulties related to the state dependency between the data and process aspects within the context of developing embedded systems and the analysis of non-functional requirements to support tool integration.

The development of safety-critical embedded systems is supported by a number of development tools, which are increasingly integrated into automated tool chains. Safety standards require these tool chains to be qualified, which is costly and requires a large effort. To reduce cost and effort tool chains can be composed of pre-qualified tools and then themselves pre-qualified by identifying the parts of tool chain software that have an impact on safety more exactly. In this paper we propose the use of a modeling language to describe this tool chain composition. This allows us to reduce effort even further by automatically analyzing the tool chain model for safety issues. It also promises to reduce the effort and cost of later steps in the deployment of the tool chain by formalizing the communication of safety issues and automating the generation of code for tool chain software.

Internal crowdsourcing utilizes a firm’s employees, of which many have a strong understanding of the domains in which the firm operates, for contributing with, developing and evaluating ideas. On the one hand, these employees can use their domain-specific knowledge to identify the value of what may seem a far-fetched solution to the average employee. On the other hand, previous research has shown that employees typically evaluate ideas in their domains less favorably if they do not align with ongoing exploitation activities. Hence, this study focuses on whether a higher degree of relevant domain-specific knowledge makes employees participating in internal crowdsourcing prefer exploitative solutions when evaluating ideas. An empirical study of an online platform for firm-internal innovation in a multinational engineering company showed that employees who only infrequently participated in internal crowdsourcing mostly contributed to and evaluated ideas within their own domain. Employees who frequently participated also contributed to and evaluated ideas outside their own domains. By statistically analyzing group differences during idea evaluation, we show that employees participating infrequently favor exploitable solutions, whereas employees participating frequently are more uncertain. The former difference is only seen concerning ideas that require domain-specific knowledge to understand, but the latter is observed for all types of ideas. This study makes three substantial contributions. First, employees with domain-specific knowledge, through their preference for exploitative solutions, bias the outcome of internal crowdsourcing when idea evaluation requires domain-specific knowledge. Second, this bias is aggravated by the overall higher level of uncertainty displayed by employees participating frequently in internal crowdsourcing and thereby tend to reach out to other domains. Third, in order to mitigate this, bias management can build engagement in internal crowdsourcing through idea challenges that do not require domain-specific knowledge and consider avoiding employees with a strongly associated domain knowledge for idea evaluation.

The emergence of technology increasingly depends on innovation ecosystems and frequently involves actors from both industry and academia. However, value creation may experience challenges due to bias formed during public-private innovation ecosystem genesis.

This empirical study of bias in a new pan-European public-private initiative provides results regarding innovation ecosystems and the individuals typically active during their genesis: value creation is biased towards the selection of incumbent firms and complement challenges, and participation is biased towards engineers with knowledge of exploitation from multiple domains and researchers with knowledge of exploitation from single domains.

This suggests that the implications of the loose coupling emphasised by the innovation ecosystems discourse and the knowledge of the different contexts in which firms capture value are more complex than previously acknowledged. The practical implications are that the ability of public innovation ecosystem leadership to act early on novel technology might be offset by the inability of involved firms to commit to bringing the technology to market and that individuals typically active during public-private innovation ecosystems genesis are not ideal for handling this challenge. In fact, increasingly connected public leadership could smother the innovation ecosystem unless well-connected and multidisciplinary researchers are brought in as brokers.

Modern safety standards designed to ensure safety in embedded system products often take a descriptive approach, focusing on describing appropriate requirements on management, processes, methods and environments during development. While the qualification of software tools has been included in several such standards, how to handle the safety implications of tools integrated into tool chains has been largely ignored. This problem is aggravated by an increase both in automation of tool integration and the size of development environments.

In this paper we define nine safety goals for tool chains and suggest a qualification method that takes a systems approach on certifying software tools as parts of tool chains. With this method, software tools are developed and pre-qualified under the assumption that certain properties will be supported by the development environment they are to be deployed in. The proposed method is intended to (1) achieve a stronger focus on the relevant parts of tool chains in regard to safety and (2) separate the extra effort these parts imply from the effort already stipulated by safety standards.

Development environments for embedded systems are moving towards increased automation between Commercial Of The Shelf (COTS) engineering tools. While automation provides new opportunities for e.g. verification, it also to some extent decreases the possibility of identifying and acting on safety issues that arise during development. To investigate the relationship between tool integration and safety we performed a System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) of a tool chain from an industrial case study. This tool chain was then reanalyzed and redesigned twice, in part motivated by identified hazards.

This paper presents our experiences from applying STPA to safety-guided design in the context of integrating COTS engineering tools into tool chains. We discuss the benefits of and difficulties with applying STPA. We also suggest improvements that complement STPA with support methods and tools.

The primary benefit was the support in categorizing risks and causes. The three difficulties we encountered were identifying context-specific causal factors, defining control structures across several domains (management, user, technical, etc.) and limiting the domains taken into account. The use of STPA during safety-guided design would be facilitated by the use of expert systems and simulation, especially in regard to relating different domains.

The transition from engineering student to early career engineer is often difficult as not all skills that constitute effective engineering practice are formally taught. Work placements are suggested as a solution by providing opportunities to learn skills that academia is unable to teach. However, academic requirements for skills such as research proficiency can be overlooked in a work placement environment, since they are often seen as of little value to engineers. Nevertheless, through interviews with master’s students that have conducted their thesis projects at a firm, their experience of boundary spanning to align academic and industrial requirements has been shown to prepare them for an (early) career in engineering by providing opportunities to learn informal professional skills. As the effect is moderated by the motivation of the individual firm for offering work placements, teachers need to consider this motivation when planning and preparing a student for such a work placement.

Master students at our institute were graduating without acceptable research proficiency. We intervened by shifting our research training from teaching-centred to student-centred, and from research-related subject content to research-related processes. We performed a mixed methods study aimed to confirm there was improved research proficiency without a negative trade-off for our students’ engineering skills. Results indicated improvements to research proficiency, which our students were able to transfer to engineering-related learning activities to increase their ability to achieve engineering synthesis. This outcome was potentially supported by our courses including several perspectives on scientific knowledge production. This implies that research training, rather than having a negative effect on engineering skills, can be helpful in learning diametrically opposing aspects of thinking required by current engineering. As engineering education evolves towards more cross-disciplinary cooperation, this implies the need to pursue the increased opportunities for students to learn about different perspectives on knowledge production.

Communities of Practice create a shared consensus on practice. Standards defining software levels enable firms to diversify practice based on a software component’s contribution to potential failure conditions. When industrial trends increase the importance of lower software levels, there is a risk that the consensus on practice for software engineers used to primarily working at higher levels of assurance is eroded. This study investigates whether this might lead to conflict and – if so – where this conflict will materialize, what the nature of it is and what it implies for safety management.

A critical case study was conducted: 33 engineers were interviewed in two rounds. The study identified a disagreement between designers with different roles. Those involved in the day-to-day activities of software development advocated elimination of practice (dropping or doing parts less stringently), while those involved in expert advice and process planning suggested transforming practice (adopting realistic alternatives).

This study contributes to practice by showing that this conflict has different implications for firms that do not lead vs those that lead the early adoption of technology. At the majority of firms, safety management might need to support the organisation of informal opinion leaders to avoid vulnerability. At early adopters, crowdsourcing could provide much-needed help to refine the understanding of new practice. Across entire industries, crowdsourcing could also benefit entire engineering standardization processes. The study contributes to theory by showing how less prescriptive standardization in the context of engineering does not automatically shift rulemaking towards allowing engineers to act more autonomously.

Digital innovation hubs (DIHs) are a strategic means to drive European Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) digital transition. The European Commission has envisioned four main functions characterizing DIHs' service portfolios (“Test before invest”; “Support to find investments”; “Innovation eco-system and networking”; and “Skills and training”). However, DIHs target different functions, e.g. focusing on helping launch novel digital technologies to market, or directing investment opportunities. DIHs are also at different maturity levels, interact with different actors and exist in regions with different conditions for innovation. There might not be an equal need for all four functions, and they might not be equally well served. This study aims to explore and derive implications for the deployment of the four main functions by DIHs. It builds on the activities of DIHs involved in the DIH initiative through several innovation actions, including FED4SAE and HUBCAP.

This Research Full Paper relates to public-private innovation ecosystems. This loosely knit form of cooperation allows for beneficial activities such as knowledge transfer, dissemination of novel technology, and recruitment. In these contexts students graduating from third-cycle education should be able to find opportunities for transferring to knowledge-intensive positions in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

However, a 3-year study of the reasons why firms approach public organisations within a Europe-wide, public-private innovation ecosystem suggests that students might struggle to find such opportunities. Through a questionnaire provided to all firms approaching the ecosystem we identify recruitment as one of their lowest ranked interests. By interviewing members of the public organisations found in the ecosystem we identify how cooperation is initiated and maintained, and how this influences the opportunities for students to transfer into industry. The results provide nuance to the current emphasis in skill development within third-cycle (engineering) education. It is rarely recognized that fostering technical skill and academic entrepreneurship might not be enough to allow all types and sizes of firms to receive engineering students. 

Particularly, this study identifies the academic and industrial boundary spanning roles at knowledge-intensive SMEs as important. These roles require a third-cycle education that early on hones skills that typically do not become critical until much later for students that pursue an academic path – e.g., the inter-organisational project management skills necessary to effectively seek research funding or to negotiate goal alignment between organisations. We argue that to allow third-cycle students to practice the finer points of such skills, universities need to evolve more distributed support structures for innovation that integrate in-depth engineering knowledge with innovation skills and have an increased focus on human and social capital.

The security and safety of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often influence each other. Ensuring that this does not have negative implications might require a large and rigorous effort during the development of CPS. However, early in the lifecycle, quick feedback can be valuable helping security and safety engineers to understand how seemingly trivial design choices in their domain may have unacceptable implications in the other.

We propose the Cyber Risk Assessment Framework (CRAF) for this purpose. The CRAF is based on openly available and widely used taxonomies from the safety and security domains, and a unique mapping of where loss of data security may impact aspects of data with safety implications. This paper represents the first time these different elements have been brought together into a single framework with an associated process. Through examples from within our organisations we show how this framework can be put to good use.

The tool integration research area emerged in the 1980s. This survey focuses on those strands of tool integration research that discuss issues beyond technology.

We reveal a discourse centered around six frequently mentioned non-functional properties. These properties have been discussed in relation to technology and high level issues. However, while technical details have been covered, high level issues and, by extension, the contexts in which tool integration can be found, are treated indifferently. We conclude that this indifference needs to be challenged, and research on a larger set of stakeholders and contexts initiated.

An inventory of the use of classification schemes underlines the difficulty of evolving the classical classification scheme published by Wasserman. Two frequently mentioned redefinitions are highlighted to facilitate their wider use.

A closer look at the limited number of research methods and the poor attention to research design indicates a need for a changed set of research methods. We propose more critical case studies and method diversification through theory triangulation.

Additionally, among disparate discourses we highlight several focusing on standardization which are likely to contain relevant findings. This suggests that open communities employed in the context of (pre-)standardization could be especially important in furthering the targeted discourse.

The use of innovative power sources in future cars has long-ranging implications on vehicle safety.  We studied these implications in the context of the guidance on software tool qualification in the then current ISO 26262 draft, when building an urban concept vehicle to participate in the 2011 Shell Eco-Marathon. While the guidance on tool qualification is detailed, the guidance in regard to tools integrated into tool chains is limited. It only points out that the environment that tools execute in needs to be taken into consideration.

In this paper we clarify the implications of tool chains on tool qualification in the context of ISO 26262 by focusing on answering two questions; first, are there parts of the development environment related to tool integration that are likely to fall outside of tool qualification efforts as currently defined by ISO 26262; secondly, can we define if, and -if so- how, tool integration is affected by ensuring functional safety.

We conclude by identifying two areas related to tool integration that are likely to fall outside the tool qualification efforts (data integrity and process logic) and describing how different constraints imposed by ISO 26262 in relation to tool qualification conflict when tool integration is improved (improvements aimed at supporting completeness, consistency and the safety lifecycle vs. tool qualification cost).

We are able to make additional conclusions in relation to the State of the Art discussion on software tool qualification according to ISO 26262. First, reference tool chains and guidelines on which characteristics tool qualification should ensure for tool chains are needed to complement ISO 26262. Secondly, guidance on tool integration can be found in the completeness characteristic, the consistency characteristic and the ISO 26262 safety lifecycle process. Finally, qualification efforts should ideally target tool chains rather than individual tools.

Multi-View Modelling Integration Frameworks (MVMIFs) may help mitigate complexity associated with the development of CPS, but may also have implications on safety. Safety-related standards do not provide guidance to mitigate this problem. We therefore suggest that MVMIFs are extended with a confidence view to support the creation of an assurance case that covers issues related to risks in the support environment.

Commercial deployment of maritime autonomous surface ships (MASSs) is close to becoming a reality. Although MASSs are fully autonomous, the industry will still allow remote operations centre (ROC) operators to intervene if a MASS is facing an emergency the MASS cannot handle by itself. A human-centred design for the associated emergency response systems will require attention to the ROC operator workplace, but also, arguably, to the behaviour-shaping constraints on the engineers building these systems. There is thus a need for an engineer-centred design of engineering organisations, influenced by the current discourse on human factors. To contribute to the discourse, think-aloud protocol interviewing was conducted with well-informed maritime operators to elicit fundamental demands on cognition and collaboration by maritime autonomy emergency response systems. Based on the results, inferences were made regarding both design factors and methodological choices for future, early phase engineering of emergency response systems. Firstly, engineering firms have to improve their informal gathering and sharing of information through gatekeepers and/or organisational liaisons. To avoid a too cautious approach to accountability, this will have to include a closer integration of development and operations. Secondly, associated studies taking the typical approach of exposing relevant operators to new design concepts in scripted scenarios should include significant flexibility and less focus on realism.

How can we improve the living standards of the visually impaired using an Arduino?

Living with visual impairment could potentially be one of the hardest things one could do. Constantly having to worry about obstacles and carrying a stick to feel your way forward. In order to combat this difficulty, we have designed Vision for the Blind.

One of the usages of ultrasonic sensors are to measure the distance from objects using sound waves. These sensors, in combination with Piezo buzzers, have been used in Vision for the Blind to warn the user of incoming obstacles by emitting sound from the buzzers. The volume of the buzzers is controlled by using a digital potentiometer and varies depending on the measured distance. All three are connected to an Arduino which has been coded to perform the given task.

The Arctic is subject to rapid climate changes that canbe difficult to track. This thesis aims to provide a user case in which researchers in the Arctic benefit from the incorporation of drones in their snow ablation research. This thesis presents a way to measure ablation stakes with the help of a sensor fusion system mounted on a drone. Ablation stakes are stakes placed on a grid over glaciers in the Arctic, below the snow and ice surface, during the winter and then measured during the summer to keep track of the amount of snow that has melted throughout the mass balance year. Each measurement is given by physically going to these stakes. The proposed solution is based on estimating the heights of the ablation stakes using a forward-faced LiDAR on a servo motor and a downward-faced ultrasonic sensor. The stake height is interpreted as the highest ultrasonic distance while the forward-faced sensor system is detecting an object within 3 m distance. The results indicate that stake height estimation using the proposed concept is a potential solution for the researchers if the roll and pitch angles of the sensor system are compensated for.

This paper presents the application of zero velocity detectors in the field of indoor positioning for industrial tightening tools particularly in tandem with an extended Kalman filter to achieve reliable estimates in position. Inertial measurement units are promising devices to use in positioning systems. Data has been collected from IMU while moving in a predefined trajectory on a tightening test rig and post-processed in MATLAB using the implemented algorithms and the results are presented. They indicate that the error accumulation can be effectively controlled to 25 cm/min for the commercial grade IMU and 15 cm/min for the navigation grade IMU. 

Numerical approaches to lateration and sensor fusion are limited by inherent measure-ment errors and the positioning performance may benefit from alternative approaches. This thesis studies the applicability of deep learning to an Ultra Wide Band (UWB) based local positioning problem in a combination of readings from an Inertial Mea-surement Unit (IMU). Relying on the Robotic Operating System (ROS) and a robotic vacuum cleaner, sensor data was gathered and time stamped in the presence of a ground truth derived from a motion capture system. The gathered time series were processed and then used to train Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs) for predicting two-dimensional coordinates and orientation in a plane. In a series of tests, accuracy and precision of the LSTM predictions were assessed and compared with two conventional approaches to positioning and orientation respectively. Results suggest that LSTMs can be applied well to positioning, however the study failed to establish benefits regarding orientation. It is concluded that the implemented LSTM increased positioning accuracy with 79.9 % and precision with 71.8 % compared to that of the conventional non-linear least mean squares approach. Comparing to the best recorded performance of the LSTM the on-chip sensor fusion with the utilised IMU was 15.8 %more accurate and 70.8 % more precise in estimating orientation from accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer readings. Despite this conclusion the study has found results indicating that significant improvements regarding orientating with LSTMs are within close reach.

The use of domestic robots seems strikingly sparse in comparison to other fields of modern technology. It is plausible to assume that the lack of pull within the area is due to an unbalance between necessity and cost for the average customer, which in turn could be caused by a prevailing belief that complete autonomy is a must for a domestic robot. This thesis considers a simplified take on tracking and a robot that on the contrary is completely de-pendent on user involvement. Three sides to such an application were stud-ied; the prospect of using infrared light for directional sensing, the di↵erence in performance between infrared and ultrasonic distance-measurement and the complications that are related to omni-wheel maneuvering. The bulk of the research was conducted with the help of a robotic prototype that was constructed by the authors.The outcome of the research boils down to three conclusions. Utilizing infrared communication in a long range while maintaining an angular re-ception field that is narrow poses many difficulties, it can however not be dismissed as a way of determining the desired direction of travel for the kind of tracking application that is considered. The results indicate that a distance-measuring sensor using ultrasonic sound performs more consistently than one using infrared light, wherefore ultrasonic technology is deemed to be preferable within the context. Finally, although a non-regulated motor-drive has an eminently negative affect on the dynamics of an omni-wheel setup, there is reason to believe that it would not pose an issue in a func-tioning tracking applicationFrom a broader perspective the outcome of this research might point a finger in a whole new direction of domestic robotics.