Cheers, I'm Thomas Larsen


Full name: Thomas Dall Larsen.
Nationality: Danish.
Date of birth: August 21st, 1970.
Curriculum Vitae

I am an assistant research professor here at The Technical University of Denmark. I became a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering in August 1995 - my masters thesis involved constructing a checkers playing robot. I then matriculated as a Ph.D. student in October 1995 at The Department of Automation. My Ph.D. is about sensor fusion. Read more about the department's work within this field at The Multi Sensor Data Fusion Project homepage. In the period from Sep 96 to March 97 I was visiting UC Berkeley where I worked in The Berkeley Expert Systems Technology Lab. The project I worked on was part of the California PATH project to automize the Californian highway system.

Now I am working with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) as a part of the EURODOCKER project that aims at constructing docking stations to facilitate the launching, recovering and recharging of AUVs. My task till now has been to develop simulation software, to be used for simulating and visualising docking operations. Check out a demo of the docking visualisation by clicking on one of the pictures below. The left one is fast but not too detailed. If you're on a fast link and posses a powerfull computer try the right one instead.

A fast demo A slow demo

When the scene has loaded, click on the AUV and watch it dock. The simulations was created using a simulation package developed by myself and Rasmus Bjerngaard allowing Simulink models and VRML visualisations to run in parallel, communicating over sockets. The two scenes shown here has been generated using a recording interface of the simulator. To read about this download the report [Simulation.pdf] or view an [abstract]. A technical report has been produced as an addendum to this report describing recent changes and implementation issues: [Technical.pdf]. In order for the demo to work your browser needs to be VRML enhanced. A free VRML viewer can be downloaded from: http://cosmosoftware.com/. If this server is down which has not exactly been an uncommon event the last few months, I have a version of the latest Cosmo Player browser for Windows NT/95 here: (click right button and choose Save Link As..) 2.1cosmo_win95nt_eng.exe.

The complete software including all DIS, Java, VRML, C, HTML, Matlab source and binaries has been collected in one package The EuroDocker Simulation Package (ESP). To get this free of charge simply click here (approx 6Mb zipped and 19Mb unzipped): Esp.zip.

If you wonder about the acronym ESP here's a quote from dictionary.com:
ESP: extrasensory perception n : apparent power to perceive things that are not present to the senses.
Oddly enough, I find that this describes quite accurately what visualisation of submerged tasks is all about.

The AUV models used in the simulations can be browsed below. The rather big (4.2Mb) model to the right is too complex and the left one maybe a bit too crude. So if anyone knows of a good polygon reduction tool to make a good but fast model please let me know.
A simple model of Martin A CAD exported model of Martin

Short resume

Oct 99 - ? Employed as a consultant in the Copenhagen office of Boston Consulting Group.
Oct 98 - Oct 99 Employed as assistant research professor at IAU working on the EURODOCKER project.
Oct 95 - Oct 98 PhD student at the Department of Automation, Technical University of Denmark. Title of the dissertation: ``Optimal Fusion of Sensors''.
Sep 90 - Aug 95 Did a M.Sc.EE degree at The Technical University of Denmark. Graduated with a project in vision based robot control.
Oct 89 - July 90 Military service in Skive Artilleri.
Aug 86 - May 89 High school degree in mathematics and physics from Silkeborg Amtsgymnasium.

Participation in conferences

CCA'99 IEEE Conference on Control Applications, Hawaii, USA.
CDC'98 IEEE Conference of Decision and Control, Florida, USA.
ICARCV'98 International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, Singapore.
FUSION'98 International Conference on Multisource-Multisensor Information Fusion, Las Vegas, USA.
MFI'96 International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems, Washington DC, USA.
CDC'95 IEEE Conference of Decision and Control, New Orleans, USA.

Miscellaneous

Dec 98 Chairman at session: ``Robot Sensor Fusion and Localization'' at the International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, Singapore.
Nov 98 Invited speaker at workshop ``Towards a Mobility Programme for PhD students'' arranged by the Confederation of European Union Rectors' Conferences.
April 98 Organiser of the DTU RoboCup '98 competition.
April 98 Invited speaker at welcoming arrangement for new PhD students at DTU.
Nov 97 Invited speaker at the Lund-Lyngby day on Control at DTU.

Publications

How to reach me
Department of Automation
Technical University of Denmark
Building 326
2800 Lyngby
Denmark
Email....................... tdl@iau.dtu.dk
Phone (direct).............. +45 45 25 35 47
Fax......................... +45 45 88 12 95


Home address:
Slejpnersgade 2, 5TV
2200 Copenhagen
Phone: +45 35 85 35 47

Last Modified: September, 1999

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