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This pilot study investigates how personalized content can be used in banking applications to encourage shaping good saving habits and increase overall financial literacy among young people. The preliminary result are recommendations including providing clear and personalized saving goals, incorporating educational content on investing and financial planning, and implementing features for tracking and categorizing expenses. Some trade-offs in usage that are presented are to minimize the use of personal data to what is necessary for personalization purposes, treat the data on a group level or increase transparency of data usage. The pilot study concludes that personalization is likely to be beneficial for both banks and their customers, given personal data is handled carefully and used in a sound financial consumer protection framework.

The knowledge of parameters, defining interaction of a robotic manipulator with environment, is crucial when robots execute contact-tasks involving tracking of trajectories while desired forces are applied on the environment. For contact tasks on planar surfaces, the inclination and stiffness of the surface are key parameters since the first one defines the direction of the desired force and trajectory, which are typically defined relative to a frame attached to the environment, and the second one is required to compute the control signal. There exist methods for estimation of inclination and stiffness, whenever they are constant. The estimation of time-varying stiffness and inclination is less studied. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate on-line the stiffness and inclination of the planar surface, when they are varying during the task execution. The method is based on adaptive observers that ensure asymptotic or finite-time convergence of the estimates to the real values of the parameters.

The presence of chattering, i.e. high frequency oscillations with finite amplitude, is unavoidable in systems driven by conventional and higher order sliding mode (HOSM) control. A widely used technique to attenuate chattering is the boundary layer (BL) method; it is based on the approximation of discontinuous terms by a saturation function. However, sliding mode control (SMC) systems with BL approximation still presents chattering due to unmodeled dynamics. Amplitude and frequency of chattering can be estimated applying describing function (DF) and harmonic balance (HB) equation techniques. In this paper, HOSM controllers such as Twisting, Nested second order, and Super Twisting (ST) extension to relative degree two, with BL approximation, are analyzed. The effect of the BL value in the parameters of chattering is studied. When the BL value increments, chattering in systems driven by Twisting and Nested may decrease in amplitude, whereas in the case of ST-extension the variation in amplitude and frequency is minimum. Analysis for the case when the derivative in Twisting and ST-extension algorithms is computed via a linear differentiator is also included. Examples and simulations verifying the results are presented.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are extensively deployed in today's safety-critical autonomous systems thanks to their excellent performance. However, they are known to make mistakes unpredictably, e.g., a DNN may misclassify an object if it is used for perception, or issue unsafe control commands if it is used for planning and control. One common cause for such unpredictable mistakes is Out-of-Distribution (OOD) input samples, i.e., samples that fall outside of the distribution of the training dataset. We present a framework for OOD detection based on outlier detection in one or more hidden layers of a DNN with a runtime monitor based on either Isolation Forest (IF) or Local Outlier Factor (LOF). Performance evaluation indicates that LOF is a promising method in terms of both the Machine Learning metrics of precision, recall, F1 score and accuracy, as well as computational efficiency during testing.

The design of robust orbitally stabilizing feedback is considered. From a known orbitally stabilizing controller for a nominal, disturbance-free system, a robustifying feedback extension is designed utilizing the sliding-mode control (SMC) methodology. The main contribution of the article is to provide a constructive procedure for designing the time-invariant switching function used in the SMC synthesis. More specifically, its zero-level set (the sliding manifold) is designed using a real Floquet–Lyapunov transformation to locally correspond to an invariant subspace of the Monodromy matrix of a transverse linearization. This ensures asymptotic stability of the periodic orbit when the system is confined to the sliding manifold, despite any system uncertainties and external disturbances satisfying a matching condition. The challenging task of oscillation control of the underactuated cart–pendulum system subject to both matched- and unmatched disturbances/uncertainties demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

The Student Conference in Interaction Technology and Design is the annual grand finale of the course Current Topic in Interaction Technology and Design at the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University, Sweden. The main objective of the course is to give the participants a forum, where they can actively discuss scientific research and development through the implementation of their own ideas and interests. The course introduces students to independently finding and researching a topic of interest for them, finding related sources of information and related research publications, writing a scientific article, peer-reviewing, and presenting their work at a conference. The course is conducted in English which is a foreign language for most of the students. The final examination format is chosen as a conference to provide a realistic environment for the presentation of the results. The work of each student has been reviewed by other participants on the course and members of the department acting not only as teachers and consultants but also as program committee members. If the reviews are favorable, the paper is accepted as a full paper at the conference and included in the proceedings.

The aim is to develop a systematic procedure for planning feasible motions for a double rotary pendulum. This pendulum has one directly actuated horizontal link and two passive links, moving in a rotating vertical plane. We plan a nontrivial oscillatory motion for the passive links that is consistent with the horizontal link rotating at a given average speed and also design a stabilizing controller to approximately induce such a motion. For the motion planning, a numerical optimization procedure is proposed in the form of a sequence of three simpler problems to systematically derive initial guesses for the final optimization search. For the controller design, firstly the system is linearized along a nominal trajectory, and then a parametrized family of candidate stabilizing controllers is designed. For each set of parameters, a necessary and sufficient stability condition can be checked for the derived linear time varying periodic system. Therefore, a numerical optimization procedure is used to find the controller gain for the linear system based on the stability condition. The performance of the closed-loop system is illustrated via numerical simulations and verified via experiments with an educational platform produced by PendCon, demonstrating achieving oscillations with required characteristics. However, the formal proofs for convergence and even for existence of almost periodic solutions are left for future studies.

The Student Conference in Interaction Technology and Design is the annual grand finale of the course Current Topic in Interaction Technology and Design at the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University. The idea and objective of the course are to give the students a forum, where they can actively participate in scientific research and development through their own ideas and interests. The course introduces students to independently finding and researching a topic of interest for them, writing a scientific article, peer-reviewing, and presenting their work at a conference. The course is conducted in English both in writing and orally, and it is a foreign language for most of the students. The conference format is chosen to provide a realistic environment for the presentation of the results. The work of each student has been reviewed both by other participants on the course and members of the department. If the reviews are favorable, the paper is accepted as a full paper at the conference and included in the proceedings.

The joint Student Conference in Interaction Technology and Design and Student Conference in Electronics and Mechatronics is the annual grand finale of the courses Current Topic in Interaction Technology and Design and Student Conference in Electronics and Mechatronics at the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University. The idea and objective of the two courses are to give the students a forum, where they can actively participate in scientific research and development through their own ideas and interests. The course introduces students to independently finding and researching a topic of interest for them, using a foreign language orally and in writing, writing a scientific article, peer-reviewing and presenting their work at a conference. The conference format was chosen to provide a realistic environment for the presentation of the results. The work has been reviewed both by other participant on the course and members of the department. If the reviews are favorable, the paper is accepted as a full paper at the conference and included in the proceedings.

An approach for introduction of transverse coordinates in a vicinity of a periodic trajectory is presented. The approach allows finding by numerical integration periodic normalized mutually-orthogonal vector-functions that form a continuously differentiable basis on moving Poincare sections for a given periodic solution of a nonlinear dynamical system. The found moving frame is used to define new local (transverse) coordinates for an associated affine nonlinear control system in a neighborhood of the trajectory, and to proceed with orbital stability analysis and/or synthesis of a stabilizing feedback control law. As a demonstrating example of the approach, the problem of orbital stabilization of a trajectory of a multibody car system is considered. The results of computer simulations of the system are presented.

Periodic motion planning for an under-actuated system is rather difficult due to differential dynamic constraints imposed by passive dynamics, and it becomes more difficult for a system with higher underactuation degree, that is with a higher difference between the number of degrees of freedom and the number of independent control inputs. However, from another point of view, these constraints also mean some relation between state variables and could be used in the motion planning. We consider a double rotary pendulum, which has an underactuation degree 2. A novel periodic motion planning is presented based on an optimization search. A necessary condition for existence of the whole periodic trajectory is given because of the higher underactuation degree of the system. Moreover this condition is given to make virtual holonomic constraint (VHC) based control design feasible. Therefore, an initial guess for the optimization of planning a feasible periodic motion is based on this necessary condition. Then, VHCs are used for the system transformation and transverse linearization is used to design a static state feedback controller with periodic matrix function gain. The controller gain is found through another optimization procedure. The effectiveness of initial guess and performance of the closed-loop system are illustrated through numerical simulations.

The joint Student Conference in Interaction Technology and Design and Student Conference in Electronics and Mechatronics is the annual grand finale of the courses Current Topic in Interaction Technology and Design and Student Conference in Electronics and Mechatronics at the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University. The idea and objective of the two courses are to give the students a forum where they can actively participate in scientific research and development through their own ideas and interests. The course introduces students to independently researching an interesting topic, using a foreign language orally and in writing, writing a scientific article, peer-review and presenting their work at a conference. The conference format was chosen to provide a realistic environment for the presentation of the results. The work has been reviewed both by other participant on the course and members of the department. If the reviews are favorable, the paper is accepted as a full paper at the conference and included in the proceedings. Research that has an interesting topic and potential for future publication is presented as work-in-progress at the conference and the abstract is included in the conference proceedings. This year 10 full papers and 2 work-in-progress papers were accepted at the conference and all included in this proceedings as full papers and extended abstracts, respectively.

We consider the problem of periodic motion planning and of designing stabilising feedback control laws for such motions in underactuated mechanical systems. A novel periodic motion planning method is proposed. Each state is parametrised by a truncated Fourier series. Then we use numerical optimisation to search for the parameters of the trigonometric polynomial exploiting the measure of discrepancy in satisfying the passive dynamics equations as a performance index. Thus an almost feasible periodic motion is found. Then a linear controller is designed and stability analysis is given to verify that solutions of the closed-loop system stay inside a tube around the planned approximately feasible periodic trajectory. Experimental results for a double rotary pendulum are shown, while numerical simulations are given for models of a spacecraft with liquid sloshing and of a chain of mass spring system.

In this paper we propose an implementation scheme of independent joint control for a four-degree-of-freedom heavy-duty hydraulic actuated crane. First, on-line generation of feasible trajectories, following a driver's lead and satisfying the actuator constrains for the redundant kinematic chain, is performed. Second, an implementation of two new Sliding Mode algorithms with variable barrier function gains, which allow robust tracking of the generated trajectory with alleviation of high frequency oscillations, is presented. Experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed semi-automation scheme, exploiting the forestry application motivated low accuracy requirement.