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Load cells are very important components in a robot system. They help the robot to get feedback from the environment around it and generate control signals accordingly. However, like every other sensor, load cells need to be calibrated over time to maintain their accuracy and precision. In the current method, they need to be detached from the robot. Then known weights are hung below the load cells to get the raw signal from the load cells. These two types of values will then be used to generate the equations that convert the raw signal to the force values. This is a challenge as not many robots are maintenance-friendly so detaching the load cells can take a lot of time, not to mention the process can damage the load cells if not conducted carefully. This research project utilizes mechanical simulation to calculate the known force values acting on the load cells without taking them out of the robot system. Then these force values are used for the calibration process. In this thesis, the in situ calibration method will be conducted on the actuator-controlled pendulum, and a bipedal robot when it is hanging on the gantry and standing on the ground. Also, since mechanical simulation requires a lot of computational power, a geometry simplification method will also be introduced so this in situ calibration method can be used for ordinary personal computers. The results show that the new calibration method is easy to work with, the force values still meet the requirements for calibration, and the computer only needs 10-12 seconds to run each simulation. Master of Science A robotic system usually need the load cell to generate the correct control signal. However, the load cell needs to be calibrated over time for maintenance. The current calibration method requires the load cell to be detached from the robot so the user can apply known forces to the load cell. This thesis introduces an in situ calibration method that can calculate forces that are applied to the load cell so the user does not need to detach the load cell from the robot. An optimization method is also introduced to make the calibration process can be done on an ordinary personal computer.

Previous research efforts have shown that fish and macroinvertebrates are responsive to fine sediment in streambeds. Excess fine sediment (<2mm in diameter) impairs over 40,000 miles of streams in the U.S., degrading habitat quality for many aquatic species. Embeddedness (emb, %), a measure of fine sediment in gravel bed streams, is negatively correlated with bankfull shear velocity (u*, m/s). This relationship can be modeled by emb = au*b, with baseline coefficient values of a = 10 and b = –1. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the applicability of this relationship across the U.S., to begin to quantify the variation of embeddedness in time, and to determine the applicability of embeddedness as a habitat metric for lotic biota. The areas that were studied included Stroubles Creek at the Virginia Tech Stream Lab, the Upper Roanoke River Basin in southwest Virginia, and Level II and III ecoregions nationwide with the U.S. EPA National Rivers and Streams Assessment dataset. Nationally, measurements of embeddedness were higher than modeled in areas with higher sediment supply, and lower than modeled in regions with low fine sediment supply. By calculating shear velocity through remotely sensed channel geometry metrics, embeddedness may be predicted throughout a stream network. Various biotic metrics were found to be correlated to embeddedness, with regional variation. Burrowing macroinvertebrate taxa, which may use increased sand to escape predation, increased with increasing embeddedness while the number of Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera (EPT) taxa, the number of lithophilic spawning fish, and the number of salmonid taxa decreased with increasing embeddedness. Highly embedded substrate is generally considered poor habitat, which was supported by a trend of decreasing intolerant fish taxa with increasing embeddedness. Richness (total number of taxa) did not show a significant correlation, indicating that embeddedness, and fine sediment in general, is not necessarily an impairment to all stream habitat, but is impactful for particular taxa. Master of Science Previous research has shown that fish and macroinvertebrates are responsive to fine sediment in streambeds. Excess fine sediment (sand, silt, and clay) impairs over 40,000 miles of streams in the U.S., degrading habitat quality for many aquatic species. Embeddedness (emb, %), a measure of fine sediment in gravel bed streams, decreases with increasing bankfull shear velocity (u*, m/s), a measure of a stream's ability to move a particular size of sediment. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the relationship between embeddedness and shear velocity in varying areas, to begin to quantify the variation of embeddedness in time, and to determine the applicability of embeddedness as a habitat metric for stream biota. The areas that were studied included Stroubles Creek at the Virginia Tech Stream Lab, the Upper Roanoke River Basin in southwest Virginia, and Level II and III ecoregions nationwide with the U.S. EPA National Rivers and Streams Assessment dataset. Nationally, measurements of embeddedness were higher in areas that may have higher sediment supply, and lower in regions with low fine sediment supply. By calculating shear velocity with remotely available stream data, embeddedness may be predicted throughout a stream network and compared with biota in those locations. Various biotic metrics were found to be correlated to embeddedness, with regional variation. Burrowing macroinvertebrate taxa, which may use increased sand to escape predation, increased with increasing embeddedness while the number of Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera (EPT) taxa, the number of lithophilic spawning fish, and the number of salmonid taxa decreased. Highly embedded substrate is generally considered poor habitat, which was supported by a trend of decreasing intolerant fish taxa with increasing embeddedness.

There is widespread evidence that countries in the tropical regions especially the less developed countries will be most affected by the impacts of climate change and global warming. Unfortunately, these countries are highly dependent on agriculture, which is very sensitive to climate change, thereby threatening food security and economic development in the region. Interestingly, agriculture is one of the main contributors to the atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, it is important that actions taken to adapt to climate change do not undermine the effectiveness of mitigation strategies that impact the agricultural sector. The present study investigates the effects of mitigation and adaptation strategies on the impacts of climate change in the agricultural sector in Northern Philippines and identifies where synergies or conflicts between the two approaches may arise. Further analysis of the selected strategies suggests that one or more adaptation strategies may be ideal to achieve the maximum benefits.

A partire dal XVII secolo, le riviste si sono affermate come canale prediletto della moderna comunicazione scientifica: con la sua forma agile e sintetica, l’articolo ha costituito il veicolo ideale attraverso il quale diffondere rapidamente e in modo capillare i risultati della ricerca nei campi delle STM, permettendo al contempo alla propria comunità di riferimento di verificare la qualità e la veridicità delle scoperte riportate – attraverso la peer-review – nonché assicurando, in termini di tempo, il primato delle scoperte. Questa modalità di comunicazione, ancora oggi in vigore, è stata interessata nel corso del Novecento da una serie di cambiamenti, che hanno finito per consolidarsi come prassi disfunzionali e ostacoli alla diffusione stessa del sapere scientifico, rendendo le riviste scientifiche degli strumenti di controllo dell’accesso alla scienza e di valutazione dei ricercatori piuttosto che dispositivi volti alla diffusione delle scoperte in grado di produrre benessere collettivo. Spinte non concertate di opposizione a tale paradigma, mosse soprattutto dalla serial crisis pricing e dalla volontà di opporsi all'oligopolio degli editori commerciali andatosi a creare, hanno finito per convergere all’inizio del nuovo millennio, concretizzandosi formalmente con la nascita e con la diffusione del movimento Open Access (OA), per l’accesso aperto alle pubblicazioni scientifiche. Il movimento OA ha interessato il paradigma concettuale alla base della produzione scientifica, ripensando strutturalmente tutto il processo di comunicazione e diffusione dei risultati scientifici, riscoprendo l’antica tradizione che muoveva la condivisione delle scoperte senza la segretezza attraverso un nuovo mezzo: Internet. Le possibilità offerte dal digitale, infatti, hanno permesso di trasformare radicalmente le modalità di comunicazione della conoscenza scientifica, di amplificarne la portata e di elaborare due nuove strategie per la disseminazione dei risultati, come esplicitato nel 2002 all’interno della Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), il manifesto fondante dell’accesso aperto: attraverso l’(auto)archiviazione all’interno degli archivi elettronici aperti (i repository) dei prodotti della ricerca, a seguito della loro pubblicazione entro periodici scientifici (la cosiddetta green road), e con la creazione di riviste open access (la gold road), che permettessero a chiunque di accedere ai risultati della ricerca finanziata con fondi pubblici senza dover pagare. L’applicazione sinergica delle due strategie delineate da BOAI ha coinvolto il mondo editoriale e il mondo accademico: all’interno della presente trattazione, si vuole evidenziare come il progetto promosso dal Dipartimento di Scienze degli Alimenti e della Nutrizione (DeFENS) dell’Università degli Studi di Milano, volto a digitalizzare il pregresso cartaceo delle due riviste scientifiche Annali di Microbiologia e Bollettino di Zoologia Agraria e Bachicoltura, risponda nelle intenzioni, nelle azioni e nelle prospettive ai principi dell’Open Access. Il capitolo d’apertura - prendendo spunto da una letteratura già sterminata - vuole fornire una panoramica teorica sull’Open Access, ripercorrendone la genesi e l’articolazione, mostrando la diffusione del movimento, le parti in gioco (editori, atenei, biblioteche, ricercatori) e le novità, sia concettuali sia strumentali, introdotte dal nuovo paradigma all’interno del sistema di produzione e comunicazione del sapere scientifico. Si evidenzieranno, altresì, i limiti materiali e concettuali che ancora oggi ostacolano la piena affermazione dell’Open Access. Nel secondo capitolo, invece, si vedrà come l’Open Access è stato attuato e integrato all’interno del mondo accademico. Ci si concentrerà sul caso specifico dell’Università degli Studi di Milano, ripercorrendo le tappe principali dell’accesso aperto all’interno dell’ateneo meneghino: l’adesione ai principi della Berlin Declaration con la Dichiarazione di Messina (2004), la creazione del repository istituzionale AIR (Archivio Istituzionale della Ricerca), la nascita della Milano University Press (MilanoUP) e, in particolare, della piattaforma di riviste diamond open access Riviste UNIMI. L’attenzione verterà sull’analisi della Policy Open Access, della Policy di AIR e dei regolamenti della Statale, osservando come – a livello programmatico e di azione – l’ateneo abbia recepito quanto previsto all’interno delle diverse Linee Guida emanate negli anni dal Gruppo Open Access della CRUI e dalla Raccomandazione 2012/417/UE del 17 luglio 2012 (sull’accesso all’informazione scientifica e sulla sua conservazione) in merito ai principi dell’Open Access e dell’Open Science. Le azioni saranno lette anche attraverso la lente delle Relazioni Annuali prodotte dal 2017 al 2022 dalla Commissione Open Science della Statale. Nella terza parte, si presenterà il progetto di digitalizzazione del DeFENS, chiarendo come tale lavoro risponda alla precipua intenzione del Dipartimento di contribuire alle politiche Open Science e Open Access dell’università e specificando il ruolo svolto delle pratiche di digitalizzazione come supporto all’accesso aperto, per assicurare la disseminazione, la conservazione e la preservazione di manufatti analogici in ambiente digitale. Il case study verrà descritto nelle fasi in cui è stato articolato il workflow: il progetto di digitalizzazione nelle sue premesse e nella sua progettazione in termini di risorse umane, economiche e di tempo; la storia delle due riviste interessate dalla digitalizzazione e i motivi che hanno portato al loro inserimento all’interno delle politiche open access; le azioni concrete compiute sul corpus cartaceo, nello specifico nelle fasi di scelta, scansione e applicazione dell’OCR compiute sui volumi, con riguardo anche alle criticità; l’archiviazione digitale dei prodotti ottenuti, compiuta di concerto con l’Ufficio di Supporto alle Politiche Open Science; lo stato attuale del progetto e le prospettive future che andranno a interessarlo, in termini di conclusione del processo, di disseminazione e di implicazioni a fronte della liberazione degli articoli contenuti nei due periodici scientifici. --- Since the seventeenth century, journals have established themselves as the favorite channel of modern scientific communication: the article has been the ideal vehicle through which to disseminate rapidly and in a capillary way the results of research in the fields of the STMs, while allowing its reference community to verify the quality and veracity of the reported discoveries - through peer-review - as well as ensuring, in terms of time, the primacy of the discoveries. This mode of communication, still in force today, was affected during the twentieth century by a series of changes, which ended up consolidating themselves as dysfunctional practices and obstacles to the very diffusion of scientific knowledge, making scientific journals tools for controlling the access to science and evaluation of researchers rather than devices aimed at disseminating discoveries capable of producing collective wellness. Unconcerted pushes of opposition to this paradigm, moved above all by the serial crisis pricing and by the desire to oppose the oligopoly of commercial publishers that had arisen, ended up converging at the beginning of the new millennium, formally materializing with the birth and diffusion of the Open Access (OA) movement, for open access to scientific publications. The OA movement has involved the conceptual paradigm at the basis of scientific production, structurally rethinking the whole process of communication and dissemination of scientific results, rediscovering the ancient tradition that moved the sharing of discoveries without secrecy through a new medium: Internet. The possibilities offered by digital technology have made it possible to radically transform the methods of communicating scientific knowledge, to amplify its scope and to develop two new strategies for the dissemination of results, as made explicit in 2002 within the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the founding statement of Open Access: through (self) archiving within open electronic archives (repositories) of research products, following their publication in scientific periodicals (the so-called green road), and with the creation of open access journals (the gold road), which would allow anyone to access the results of publicly funded research without paying. The synergistic application of the BOAI's two strategies has involved the publishing world and the academic world: within the present discussion, we want to highlight how the project promoted by the Department of Food and Nutrition Sciences (DeFENS) of the University of Studi di Milano, aimed at digitizing the previous analogic copies of the two scientific journals Annali di Microbiologia (now Annals of Microbiology) and Bollettino di Zoologia Agraria e Bachicoltura (now Journal of Entomological and Acarological Research), responds in intentions, actions and perspectives to the principles of Open Access. The opening chapter aims to provide a theoretical overview of Open Access, retracing its genesis and articulation, showing the diffusion of the movement, the parties involved (publishers, universities, libraries, researchers) and the innovations, both conceptual and instrumental, introduced by the new paradigm within the system of production and communication of scientific knowledge. The material and conceptual limits that still today hinder the full affirmation of Open Access will also be highlighted. In the second chapter, we will see how Open Access has been implemented and integrated within the academic world. We will focus on the specific case of the University of Milan, retracing the main stages of Open Access within this university: adherence to the principles of the Berlin Declaration with the Messina Declaration (2004), the creation of the repository AIR (Institutional Research Archive), the birth of the Milano University Press (MilanoUP) and, in particular, of the diamond open access e-journals platform Riviste UNIMI. Attention will focus on the analysis of the Open Access Policy, the AIR Policy and the regulations of the university, observing how - at a programmatic and action level - the University of Milan has implemented the provisions of the various Guidelines issued over the years by the Open Access Group of the CRUI and by Recommendation 2012/417/EU of 17 July 2012 (on access to scientific information and its conservation) regarding the principles of Open Access and Open Science. The actions will also be read through the lens of the Annual Reports produced from 2017 to 2022 by the University of Milan's Open Science Commission. In the last chapter, the DeFENS digitization project will be presented, clarifying how this work responds to the main intention of the Department to contribute to the University of Milan's Open Science and Open Access policies and specifying the role played by digitization practices in supporting Open Access, to ensure the dissemination, conservation and preservation of analog artefacts in a digital environment. The case study will be described in the stages in which the workflow was articulated: the digitization project in its premises and in its planning in terms of human, economic and time resources; the history of the two journals affected by digitization and the reasons that led to their inclusion in open access policies; the concrete actions carried out on the paper corpus, specifically in the phases of selection, scanning and application of the OCR carried out on the volumes, also with regard to critical issues; the digital archiving of the products obtained, carried out in concert with the Open Science Policy Support Office; the current state of the project and the future prospects that will affect it, in terms of conclusion of the process, dissemination and implications in view of the release of the articles contained in the two scientific periodicals. I riferimenti bibliografici sono quasi interamente ad accesso aperto. -- The bibliographic references are mostly open access.

Master of Science Material extrusion is a common form of 3D printing that has historically been limited to producing prototypes, models, and low load-bearing parts. This is primarily because parts are manufactured layer-by-layer, resulting in poor adhesion along the build direction, and machines struggle to print with high-strength polymers, which tend to shrink significantly as they cool. However, one way to address these limitations is to use fiber-reinforced materials in combination with multi-axis deposition strategies. In material extrusion, embedded fibers will align themselves along the deposition path, providing structural, thermal, and chemical improvements. Multi-axis toolpathing can enable the deposition of this fiber-filled material in full 3D along a part's expected stress paths. This is possible using a complex kinematic system like an industrial robot arm that can rotate the angle of the tool relative to the part as it is printing. The objective of this work was to develop and test a tool capable of multi-axis continuous carbon fiber reinforcement, which required a dedicated cutting mechanism to shear the fiber at the end of each deposition path, control over the amount of fiber used, and a slender tool profile to avoid collisions during multi-axis printing. The findings of this work revealed that while the use of continuous carbon fiber further reduced the adhesion between deposition paths, it substantially improved the strength of the part along them. To validate the multi-axis capability of the system, a toolpath was generated for a curved tensile bar. The results showed that the continuous carbon fiber multi-axis toolpath resisted a load 820.57% higher than an XY-planar sliced part printed with traditional filament, confirming the effectiveness of the presented approach. Multi-axis motion can also be used for avoiding support material requirements. In traditional 3-axis material extrusion, steep overhanging features often require additional, sacrificial material to be printed underneath. This leads to longer print times, more material waste, and a poor surface finish left behind on the final part. To minimize the amount of support material required, various techniques have been explored, including changing the toolpath, part geometry, or material processing parameters. However, none of these techniques have been successful in eliminating the need for supports entirely. A promising approach to address this issue is multi-axis material extrusion, where the angle of the printing tool and the direction of the layers can be precisely controlled during the printing process. This technique can be used to ensure that the tool is always extruding material onto a well-supported surface, rather than over thin air. However, research to date has not yet fully explored how the range of achievable overhang features changes as the tool is rotated. To address this knowledge gap, this work used an industrial robot arm equipped for material extrusion to investigate the relationship between tool angle, build direction, and achievable overhang threshold. The results showed that the same overhang limitations that exist in the XY plane will rotate with the tool and are unaffected by gravitational forces. These findings provide valuable insights for advancing the use of multi-axis material extrusion in the production of complex and intricate 3D objects without the need of supports.

As robots have become more pervasive in our everyday life, social aspects of robots have attracted researchers' attention. Because emotions play a key role in social interactions, research has been conducted on conveying emotions via speech, whereas little research has focused on the effects of non-speech sounds on users' robot perception. We conducted a within-subjects exploratory study with 40 young adults to investigate the effects of non-speech sounds (regular voice, characterized voice, musical sound, and no sound) and basic emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) on user perception. While listening to the fairytale with the participant, a humanoid robot (Pepper) responded to the story with a recorded emotional sound with a gesture. Participants showed significantly higher emotion recognition accuracy from the regular voice than from other sounds. The confusion matrix showed that happiness and sadness had the highest emotion recognition accuracy, which aligns with the previous research. Regular voice also induced higher trust, naturalness, and preference compared to other sounds. Interestingly, musical sound mostly showed lower perceptions than no sound. A further exploratory study was conducted with an additional 49 young people to investigate the effect of regular non-verbal voices (female voices and male voices) and basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and relief) on user perception. We also further explored the impact of participants' gender on emotion and social perception toward robot Pepper. While listening to a fairy tale with the participants, a humanoid robot (Pepper) responded to the story with gestures and emotional voices. Participants showed significantly higher emotion recognition accuracy and social perception from the voice + Gesture condition than Gesture only conditions. The confusion matrix showed that happiness and sadness had the highest emotion recognition accuracy, which aligns with the previous research. Interestingly, participants felt more discomfort and anthropomorphism in male voices compared to female voices. Male participants were more likely to feel uncomfortable when interacting with Pepper. In contrast, female participants were more likely to feel warm. However, the gender of the robot voice or the gender of the participant did not affect the accuracy of emotion recognition. Results are discussed with social robot design guidelines for emotional cues and future research directions. Master of Science As robots increasingly appear in people's lives as functional assistants or for entertainment, there are more and more scenarios in which people interact with robots. More research on human-robot interaction is being proposed to help develop more natural ways of interaction. Our study focuses on the effects of emotions conveyed by a humanoid robot's non-speech sounds on people's perception about the robot and its emotions. The results of our experiments show that the accuracy of emotion recognition of regular voices is significantly higher than that of music and robot-like voices and elicits higher trust, naturalness, and preference. The gender of the robot's voice or the gender of the participant did not affect the accuracy of emotion recognition. People are now not inclined to traditional stereotypes of robotic voices (e.g., like old movies), and expressing emotions with music and gestures mostly shows a lower perception. Happiness and sadness were identified with the highest accuracy among the emotions we studied. Participants felt more discomfort and human-likeness in the male voices than in female voices. Male participants were more likely to feel uncomfortable when interacting with the humanoid robot, while female participants were more likely to feel warm. Our study discusses design guidelines and future research directions for emotional cues in social robots.

Firmware development for Low-Level Controllers is an extremely complex task. Single-threaded microcontrollers are most commonly used for these controllers and thus are only capable of executing a single task at a time. Microcontroller software tends to be designed for an extremely specific task with little room for scalability or code reuse. Additionally, the state of a microcontroller at run-time is very difficult to observe and thus makes it harder to debug and develop these control systems. To alleviate these development issues, a software framework was designed to simplify firmware development for Hardware Abstract Layered (HAL) control systems. The software framework was implemented on Texas Instruments TM4C123GXL Tivas on a multi-joint robot with the purpose of experimenting on a distributed microcontroller system. All of the software for the microcontroller was implemented into one program with initialization files from the high-level controller to configure each individual Tiva based on its functionality in the distributed system. The EtherCAT communication protocol is used primarily for its fast communication speed between high-level and low-level controllers. A basic GUI development environment accompanies the framework to aid in the initial development of a custom controller firmware and thus reduce development time. Additionally, this framework is designed to be easily scalable such that a real-time operating system (RTOS) can be implemented with minimal effort should the developer desire to do so. The proposed software framework thus overcomes major challenges when developing firmware for low-level controllers making development overall less time-consuming. Further, this framework can be used for many different robotic applications with a low-level multi-layered control architecture. Master of Science Microcontrollers and embedded systems are used everywhere in our daily lives in the technology we love. From microwaves, to cars, to phones, to toaster ovens, these systems are implemented in practically every piece of technology we use on a daily basis. Software development of these systems tends to be extremely complicated and complex. Hence, the software designed for these systems is usually overly specific to the device with little room for code reuse and/or scalability. This issue is extremely present in the field of robotics. To alleviate this issue, this work proposed, designed, and implemented a software framework for microcontrollers in a distributed network for robotics applications. Additionally, a graphical interface was developed to customize the software framework for a developer's specific needs regarding what the application needs to do.

The EU milk quota abolition initiated considerable restructuring in the EU dairy sector. Ireland is one of the countries that experienced significant growth, which has led to changes in farm labour demand. This PhD thesis aims to assess the role of family and hired labour, and automation in enhancing the efficiency of farms in an evolving dairy sector. Based on farm-level panel data sets from 2000 to 2019, and a cross-section supplementary data in 2018, the thesis presents three analyses of farm labour and productivity on Irish dairy farms. The first analysis explores the effect of hired labour on farms' technical efficiency (TE). Using a state-of-the-art stochastic frontier model that controls for endogeneity between inputs and TE, the findings reveal that hired labour positively affects farms' TE, improving dairy production. The findings suggest that the positive effect of hired labour on TE is marginally higher for smaller farms. The second analysis examines the role of automation in the efficiency of Irish dairy farms. A latent class stochastic frontier model is used to jointly estimate TE scores and identify two latent classes of farms utilising different technologies in their production, i.e., smaller, less intensive, and larger, more intensive farms. The results show that automated technologies (i.e., automatic parlour feeders, cluster removers, and scrapers) have heterogeneous effects on farms TE. Specifically, automated cluster removers and scrapers are correlated with higher TE scores in the smaller, less-intensive farms. Automated parlour feeders positively correlate to the TE of the larger-more-intensive farms. The third analysis focuses on estimating the shadow wage of family labour and assesses its role in the demand for hired labour on the farm. A two-step structural production function approach is used to estimate unpaid family labour shadow wage, and a semi-parametric censored dependent variable data model is applied to explore the role of shadow wages on hired labour demand. The findings show that as the size of the farm increase, so does the family labour shadow wage. Moreover, the results indicate positive returns to farmers' formal agricultural education. Finally, findings suggest a substitution and income effect of shadow wages in demand for hired labour— the substitution effect is larger for the demand of casual hired labour. Overall, this thesis provides an improved understanding of farm labour and its link with automation and efficiency as crucial factors for the sustainable development of an evolving dairy sector. 2025-06-19

This thesis develops the technique of millimetre-wave radar at 94 GHz for close-range remote sensing of glaciers and terrestrial snow cover (the cryosphere). The capabilities of 94 GHz radar for cryosphere mapping are demonstrated using the 2ⁿᵈ generation All-weather Volcano Topography Imaging Sensor (AVTIS2), which maps 3D terrain from real-beam scanning. AVTIS2 acquires 3D point clouds of terrain and a comparison to co-located high density point clouds derived from Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) data showed that AVTIS2 point cloud uncertainties were 1.5 m at 1.5 km and 3 m at 3 km. These values are smaller than other close-range radar systems used to map cryospheric terrain in 3D. Next, the distribution of Normalised Radar Cross Section (σ⁰) values over glacier ice at 94 GHz was found to be −17.0 < σ⁰ < −3.4; σ⁰ₘₑₐₙ = −9.9 dB and followed a log-normal distribution. These values are comparable to other terrain types at 94 GHz such as refrozen snow, wet snow and wet soil, hence glacier surfaces were found to be suitable targets for terrain mapping at 94 GHz. These fundamental results were used to apply the AVTIS2 94 GHz radar for monitoring snow cover and glacier calving. Field trials in Scotland showed that the transition of wet snow to a refrozen snowpack in response to reductions in air temperature could be detected from changes in 94 GHz σ⁰. Snow hazard features could also be identified, such as post-avalanche debris accumulations which manifest as localised increases in radar backscatter. Next, 3D AVTIS2 data was used to quantify glacier calving rates at the Hansbreen tidewater glacier in Svalbard. A time series of ice cliff morphology derived from the AVTIS2 3D data sets exposed the role of melt undercutting and demonstrated the critical role of the ocean on calving processes in Svalbard. The high accuracy 3D data acquired from AVTIS2 and the sensitivity of radar backscatter to surface changes has demonstrated the unique capabilities of 94 GHz radar for cryosphere mapping, paving the way forward for new applications and opportunities for close-range remote sensing of the cryosphere.

A Design Science approach of stability, evolvability, and modularity on a C# software artifact.