Cross-sector solutions are needed for sustainable industrial production chains. The German project "WESTKUESTE 100" proposes such a process chain to minimize production costs of green hydrogen and green methanol and make the clinker production more sustainable. Due to the volatility of the renewable energy sources, storage systems for hydrogen, oxygen and carbon-dioxide are necessary. An optimal use of these storages is essential due to the seasonal fluctuations of wind and solar energy production. In this paper, the process chain is modeled, dynamically simulated and controlled by a custom model predictive controller over a time span of 16 years. The custom model predictive controller showed significant improvements in the methanol output with a rising prediction horizon, with a seasonal schedule for the storages.

We present the new HippoCampus micro underwater vehicle, first introduced in [1]. It is designed for monitoring confined fluid volumes. These tightly constrained settings demand agile vehicle dynamics. Moreover, we adapt a robust attitude control scheme for aerial drones to the underwater domain. We demonstrate the performance of the controller with a challenging maneuver. A submerged Furuta pendulum is stabilized by HippoCampus after a swing-up. The experimental results reveal the robustness of the control method, as the system quickly recovers from strong physical disturbances, which are applied to the system.

A hyperbolic acoustic system for underwater robot self-localization is presented. Anchored transducers send acoustic signals which are observed by a receiver. The system is passive with one-way signal transmission. Time differences of arrival (TDOAs) between the emitted signals are estimated by the receiver via cross-correlation. These TDOAs are fed to an Extended Kalman Filter to estimate the global position of the receiver. We describe the complete signal processing chain as well as challenges in hardware and software design. Experimental results in air and water show the feasibility of the system. This paper demonstrates that acoustic one-way localization is possible with off-the-shelf hardware in experimental test tanks.

The HippoCampus platform is a low-cost micro autonomous underwater vehicle for swarm robotics research. This paper presents the hardware and software design, the communication link, instrumentation, and control system. The quadrotor design enables the vehicle to perform agile maneuvers in a very confined test tank. Vehicle navigation is based on the on-board sensor suite. Autonomous path following is presented and experimental results are evaluated.