The evanescent field of an optical waveguide can be used to trap and propel microscopic particles. A 1µm particle is trapped on a strip waveguide and propelled forward until it reaches a 10µm gap at the centre of a loop, created by splitting the waveguide into two branches. According to simulations, the particle will be elevated 3µm in the gap and be stably trapped in the middle of the gap. The goal ...

The Norwegian public healthcare system will not have the manpower to care for the elderly at the same level as now, unless technological solutions are found to make the most of the available manpower. This thesis investigates potential technologies for allowing the Giraff, a telepresence robot, to navigate and patrol an eldercare center autonomously, thus letting caregivers save time when checking ...

Microparticles are trapped by optical forces created by the evanescent field present on the surface of an optical waveguide. An optical waveguide loop with an intentional gap is used to propel and stably hold the trapped particles. The particles are trapped in the gap of the loop by counter-diverging fields. Simulations indicate that particles trapped in the gap on a strip waveguide will be levitated. ...

The focus of this thesis is to develop a Markov Chain based framework for joint ranking and clustering of a dataset without the need for critical user-defined hyper-parameters. Joint ranking and clustering may be useful in several respects, and may give additional insight for the data analyst, as opposed to the traditional separate ranking and clustering procedures. By coupling Markov ...

The studies about the climatic changes have always more underlined the importance of the climatic balance of the Arctic regions. For this reason the need of monitoring the Arctic becomes always more urgent. To measure the sea ice thickness, the sea ice cover, the motion of the glaciers and to discriminate the various kind of ice are only several of the challenges about the Arctic monitoring. But the ...

The growing wind power industry, increased occurrence of extreme weather, and the need for becoming independent of fossil fuels motivate the research on accurate simulation of near-surface wind. The aim of this study is wind resource assessment at the potential wind park site Rieppi, using two on-site measurement masts, simulations from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, and ERA-Interim ...

The focus of this thesis is to find and verify a non-invasive method to determine the layer distribution (stratigraphy) in snowpacks, which might aid avalanche risk assessment. Slab avalanches release due to failure and collapse in a weak snow layer. Determining the spatial distribution and depth of weak layers in avalanche starting zones is a high-risk task. Moreover, by manually digging snow ...

Mellin kind (MK) statistics is the framework which arises if the Fourier transform is replaced with the Mellin transform when computing the characteristic function from the probability density function. We may then proceed to retrieve logarithmic moments and cumulants, which have important applications in the analysis of heavy-tailed distribution models for non-negative random variables. In this ...

In the field of Remote Sensing the main device, used to obtain the surface images, are the so-called Synthetic Aperture Radar. This systems are devices able to catch high-resolution images, which keep peculiar informations about the observed surface. Through the use of a Radar, mounted on board of a spaceborne or airborne vehicle, large overflow areas are electromagnetically radiating. The ...

The focus of this thesis is to find an alternative way to reconstruct a pseudo quadrature polarimetric (quad-pol) covariance matrix from compact polarimetric (compact-pol) data. In the latest years, the compact polarimetry SAR mode was developed and used more and more widely. It provides a good compromise between area covered and information content per pixel [13]. The literature has focused ...