Enter the next level

As part of Combine’s continued involvement in Ocean Data Factory Sweden, our team has collaborated with our partners to apply machine learning techniques to the compelling use case of underwater species detection in the Kosterhavet National Park on Sweden’s west coast.

A few years ago, Combine purchased a small submarine. This vehicle is connected to a workstation with a long ethernet cable and is known as a ROV (remotely operated underwater vehicle). During several projects, some degree of autonomous capability has been added to the vehicle, and we are planning to turn it into a fully AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) in the future. Students from Linköping University have performed most of the developing work and the ROV has been the focus of both master’s theses and project courses. At this moment, we have eight students working on creating a digital twin with an associated simulation environment. The plan is to make the software development as efficient as possible, removing the drawback of needing a pool for every test. The ROV is also an excellent platform to show interested people how to work with model-based development and how to set up HIL (hardware-in-the-loop) testing.

Model predictive control can be an excellent control method finding optimal control inputs to a system. At the heart of the control method is an optimizer. In this blog, you can read about three powerful optimization algorithms and how they perform when they control a vehicle in a complex scenario.

After a turbulent spring, it is finally time to write about some of the new features of Sympathy for Data and the updates in the ecosystem we made earlier in 2020. Earlier this year, we released Sympathy for Data 2.0.0 which was the first version with two different editions, an open-source and an enterprise edition. In this blog post, we will follow up on some of the most exciting changes introduced in version 2.0.0 and the recently released version 2.1.0.

In the last months, Sweden has continued to see an increase in the number of cases and the number of deaths due to COVID-19. One issue that has become apparent in this time is the lack of information from some government agencies in Sweden in other languages than Swedish and English. This puts many in a vulnerable position and at an informational disadvantage that could be costly for everyone in Sweden. A presentation by Folkhälsomyndigheten last week confirmed that the proportion of cases among Sweden’s foreign-born population is much higher than their proportion of Sweden’s population.