Roger, Lars and Øivind attended the 18th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), which was held in beautiful Milano, Italy, half a century after the 1st memorable congress of Moscow (1960).

“The IFAC World Congress is the forum of excellence for the exploration of the frontiers in control science and technology, attended by a worldwide audience of scientists and engineers from academia and industry. It offers the most up-to-date and complete view of control techniques, with the widest coverage of application fields”. – IFAC website

The huge conference housed at most 26 parallel sessions, but despite this and the Italian heat we found many interesting presentations to attend, and update ourselves on.

Roger and Øivind prestented their work on disturbance rejection by acceleration feedforward on the first day of the conference. Lars presented ..

When not at the conference we enjoyed the city of Milano, with its ancient origins, good food and delightful atmosphere.

- Øivind

Spring has finally arrived in Trondheim and the team is doing well. We are all currently taking courses, doing research and preparing experiments. Some of us have already published some papers (see Publication page) and is going to conferences this year.

All of us, except Qin, are participating in the planned ice experiments of the Dynamic Positioning in Ice (DYPIC) project in HSVA in Hamburg in late May. The topic is to investigate the performance of DP systems in ice and come up with guidelines and procedures for tuning. This will be a valuable experience for the team as we get hands on experience with vessels and DP in ice.

Joakim and Qin are also attending an experiment using UAVs in Svalbard to obtain ice information. This will be an important experiment showing the feasibility of drone systems in the Arctic environment.

We eagerly look forward for the experiments and hope to learn as much as possible. There will be an update once we return.

Sincerely,

Øivind

The project PhD candidates along with Professor Roger Skjetne and post doc. Francesco Scibilia attended the Oppdal Control Workshop during 16-18 February 2011. The main theme of the workshop was unmanned vehicles for maritime applications, comprising both academic and industrial participants. All Arctic DP project participants held presentations on their research with the following titles: