Daily minimum and maximum temperature simulation over complex terrain

Spatiotemporal simulation of minimum and maximum temperature is a fundamental requirement for climate impact studies and hydrological or agricultural models. Particularly over regions with variable orography, these simulations are difficult to produce due to terrain driven nonstationarity. We develop a bivariate stochastic model for the spatiotemporal field of minimum and maximum temperature. The proposed framework splits the bivariate field into two components of "local climate" and "weather." The local climate component is a linear model with spatially varying process coefficients capturing the annual cycle and yielding local climate estimates at all locations, not only those within the observation network. The weather component spatially correlates the bivariate simulations, whose matrix-valued covariance function we estimate using a nonparametric kernel smoother that retains nonnegative definiteness and allows for substantial nonstationarity across the simulation domain. The statistical model is augmented with a spatially varying nugget effect to allow for locally varying small scale variability. Our model is applied to a daily temperature data set covering the complex terrain of Colorado, USA, and successfully accommodates substantial temporally varying nonstationarity in both the direct-covariance and cross-covariance functions.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS602 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Learning Image-Conditioned Dynamics Models for Control of Under-actuated Legged Millirobots

Millirobots are a promising robotic platform for many applications due to their small size and low manufacturing costs. Legged millirobots, in particular, can provide increased mobility in complex environments and improved scaling of obstacles. However, controlling these small, highly dynamic, and underactuated legged systems is difficult. Hand-engineered controllers can sometimes control these legged millirobots, but they have difficulties with dynamic maneuvers and complex terrains. We present an approach for controlling a real-world legged millirobot that is based on learned neural network models. Using less than 17 minutes of data, our method can learn a predictive model of the robot's dynamics that can enable effective gaits to be synthesized on the fly for following user-specified waypoints on a given terrain. Furthermore, by leveraging expressive, high-capacity neural network models, our approach allows for these predictions to be directly conditioned on camera images, endowing the robot with the ability to predict how different terrains might affect its dynamics. This enables sample-efficient and effective learning for locomotion of a dynamic legged millirobot on various terrains, including gravel, turf, carpet, and styrofoam. Experiment videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/imageconddy

A Survey of Air-to-Ground Propagation Channel Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly for small UAVs, due to their affordable prices, ease of availability, and ease of operability. Existing and future applications of UAVs include remote surveillance and monitoring, relief operations, package delivery, and communication backhaul infrastructure. Additionally, UAVs are envisioned as an important component of 5G wireless technology and beyond. The unique application scenarios for UAVs necessitate accurate air-to-ground (AG) propagation channel models for designing and evaluating UAV communication links for control/non-payload as well as payload data transmissions. These AG propagation models have not been investigated in detail when compared to terrestrial propagation models. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is provided on available AG channel measurement campaigns, large and small scale fading channel models, their limitations, and future research directions for UAV communication scenarios