Elias Rosch

Master of Science - M. Sc.

Bachelor of Science - B. Sc.

festo-edcon is a python package which bundles modules to facilitate operation of Festo electric drives (currently via EtherNet/IP and ModbusTCP) using PROFIDRIVE telegrams.

KiteOS is the designated firmware implemented on dedicated STM32H7 microprocessors and is used for physical interaction with any sensor or actuator. The core functionality consists of a hardware abstraction layer and a set of core services that are built on top to provide basic operations, e. g. communication, timing, and persistent memory manipulaton. Additionally KiteOS ships with a set of device drivers that can be used to interface sensors, actuators and other devices via software.

Simulation, Optimization and Control of High-Altitude Wind Power Generators

The evolution of microelectronics increased the information acquired by today’s biomedical sensor systems to an extent where the capacity of low-power communication interfaces becomes one of the central bottlenecks. Hence, this paper mathematically analyzes and experimentally verifies novel coil and transceiver topologies for near-field communication interfaces, which simultaneously allow for high data transfer rates, low power consumption, and reduced interference to nearby wireless power transfer interfaces. Data coil design is focused on presenting two particular topologies which provide sufficient coupling between a reader and a wireless sensor system, but do not couple to an energy coil situated on the same substrate, severely reducing interference between wireless data and energy transfer interfaces. A novel transceiver design combines the approaches of a minimalistic analog front-end with a fully digital single-bit sampling demodulator, in which rectangular binary signals are processed by simple digital circuits instead of sinusoidal signals being conditioned by complex analog mixers and subsequent multi-bit analog-to-digital converters. The concepts are implemented using an analog interface in discrete circuit technology and a commercial low-power field-programmable gate array, yielding a transceiver which supports data rates of up to 6.78 MBit/s with an energy consumption of just 646 pJ/bit in transmitting mode and of 364 pJ/bit in receiving mode at a bit error rate of 2 * 10e-7, being 10 times more energy efficient than any commercial NFC interface and fully implementable without any custom CMOS technology.

This paper presents the development of a modular open source platform for experimental control setups. The platform emerged from research on the automatic rotation start-up and landing of a tethered airplane for wind energy harvesting, implementing and testing new theoretical concepts such as real-time moving horizon estimation (MHE) and non-linear model predictive control (NMPC) on equally new test equipment. As experimental setups for testing new control algorithms tend to be fine-tuned by trial and error methods, a rapid control prototyping system for fast evaluation had to be implemented. Technical results of this research are presented in the form of a modular platform for real-time control. The created platform supplies a complete toolchain for performing, observing and evaluating control experiments. It offers modular low-cost hardware and free software especially suited for flight control experiments. Clearly defined interfaces between the components allow for expanding on its current capabilities for other control scenarios in need of fast and reliable real-time control. The provided modularity allows for spatial separation of high performance computing hardware from low-level components, permits rapid reconfiguration of the experiment and eases the collaboration and workflow between hardware developers and control engineers.