Innovative Technologies for Global Space Exploration

Under the direction of NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD), Directorate Integration Office (DIO), The Tauri Group with NASA's Technology Assessment and Integration Team (TAIT) completed several studies and white papers that identify novel technologies for human exploration. These studies provide technical inputs to space exploration roadmaps, identify potential organizations for exploration partnerships, and detail crosscutting technologies that may meet some of NASA's critical needs. These studies are supported by a relational database of more than 400 externally funded technologies relevant to current exploration challenges. The identified technologies can be integrated into existing and developing roadmaps to leverage external resources, thereby reducing the cost of space exploration. This approach to identifying potential spin-in technologies and partnerships could apply to other national space programs, as well as international and multi-government activities. This paper highlights innovative technologies and potential partnerships from economic sectors that historically are less connected to space exploration. It includes breakthrough concepts that could have a significant impact on space exploration and discusses the role of breakthrough concepts in technology planning. Technologies and partnerships are from NASA's Technology Horizons and Technology Frontiers game-changing and breakthrough technology reports as well as the External Government Technology Dataset, briefly described in the paper. The paper highlights example novel technologies that could be spun-in from government and commercial sources, including virtual worlds, synthetic biology, and human augmentation. It will consider how these technologies can impact space exploration and will discuss ongoing activities for planning and preparing them

Motion control using optical flow of sparse image features

Reactive motion planning and local navigation of robots remains a significant challenge in the motion control of robotic vehicles. This thesis presents new results on vision guided navigation using optical flow. By detecting key image features, calculating optical flow and leveraging time-to-transit (tau) as a feedback signal, control architectures can steer a vehicle so as to avoid obstacles while simultaneously using them as navigation beacons. Averaging and balancing tau over multiple image features successfully guides a vehicle along a corridor while avoiding looming objects in the periphery. In addition, the averaging strategy deemphasizes noise associated with rotationally induced flow fields, mitigating risks of positive feedback akin to the Larsen effect. A recently developed, biologically inspired, binary-key point description algorithm, FReaK, offers process speed-ups that make vision-based feedback signals achievable. A Parrot ARDrone2 has proven to be a reliable platform for testing the architecture and has demonstrated the control law's effectiveness in using time-to-transit calculations for real-time navigation

The words of the body: psychophysiological patterns in dissociative narratives

Trauma has severe consequences on both psychological and somatic levels, even affecting the genetic expression and the cell\u2019s DNA repair ability. A key mechanism in the understanding of clinical disorders deriving from trauma is identified in dissociation, as a primitive defense against the fragmentation of the self originated by overwhelming experiences. The dysregulation of the interpersonal patterns due to the traumatic experience and its detrimental effects on the body are supported by influent neuroscientific models such as Damasio\u2019s somatic markers and Porges\u2019 polyvagal theory. On the basis of these premises, and supported by our previous empirical observations on 40 simulated clinical sessions, we will discuss the longitudinal process of a brief psychodynamic psychotherapy (16 sessions, weekly frequency) with a patient who suffered a relational trauma. The research design consists of the collection of self-report and projective tests, pre-post therapy and after each clinical session, in order to assess personality, empathy, clinical alliance and clinical progress, along with the verbatim analysis of the transcripts trough the Psychotherapy Process Q-Set and the Collaborative Interactions Scale. Furthermore, we collected simultaneous psychophysiological measures of the therapeutic dyad: skin conductance and hearth rate. Lastly, we employed a computerized analysis of non-verbal behaviors to assess synchrony in posture and gestures. These automated measures are able to highlight moments of affective concordance and discordance, allowing for a deep understanding of the mutual regulations between the patient and the therapist. Preliminary results showed that psychophysiological changes in dyadic synchrony, observed in body movements, skin conductance and hearth rate, occurred within sessions during the discussion of traumatic experiences, with levels of attunement that changed in both therapist and the patient depending on the quality of the emotional representation of the experience. These results go in the direction of understanding the relational process in trauma therapy, using an integrative language in which both clinical and neurophysiological knowledge may take advantage of each other

Horizontal Fusion: Enabling Net-Centric Operations and Warfare

the ability to access real-time information at the right time to make the right decisions

NASA SBIR abstracts of 1991 phase 1 projects

The objectives of 301 projects placed under contract by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are described. These projects were selected competitively from among proposals submitted to NASA in response to the 1991 SBIR Program Solicitation. The basic document consists of edited, non-proprietary abstracts of the winning proposals submitted by small businesses. The abstracts are presented under the 15 technical topics within which Phase 1 proposals were solicited. Each project was assigned a sequential identifying number from 001 to 301, in order of its appearance in the body of the report. Appendixes to provide additional information about the SBIR program and permit cross-reference of the 1991 Phase 1 projects by company name, location by state, principal investigator, NASA Field Center responsible for management of each project, and NASA contract number are included

Neighborhood Crime and Transit Station Access Mode choice - Phase III of Neighborhood Crime and Travel Behavior

This report provides the findings from the third phase of a three-part study about the influences of neighborhood crimes on travel mode choice. While previous phases found evidence that high levels of neighborhood crime discourage people from choosing to walk, bicycle and ride transit, consistent with the authors’ hypothesis, they also produced counterintuitive findings suggesting that in some cases, high crime neighborhoods encourage transit ridership at the expense of driving—the opposite of what common sense would suggest. Phase 3 tested possible explanations for these counterintuitive findings with a series of methodological improvements. These improvements were: Improvement 1: Used the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system‘s 2008 Station Profile Survey travel data set to replace the Bay Area Travel Survey (BATS) 2000 data used in previous phases. Improvement 2: Separated drop-off and drive-alone modes in logit models. Improvement 3: Variables at the corridor level replaced previous variables at the transportation analysis zone (TAZ) level. Improvement 4: Average parcel size (APS) variable replaced the intersection density measure of urban design. Improvement 5: Used nested logit modeling techniques. These yielded strong evidence supporting the hypothesis that high-crime neighborhoods encourage driving, and they generated none of the counterintuitive findings from previous phases

Small cities face greater impact from automation

The city has proven to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on jobs, a question looms: How will automation affect employment in cities? Here, we provide a comparative picture of the impact of automation across U.S. urban areas. Small cities will undertake greater adjustments, such as worker displacement and job content substitutions. We demonstrate that large cities exhibit increased occupational and skill specialization due to increased abundance of managerial and technical professions. These occupations are not easily automatable, and, thus, reduce the potential impact of automation in large cities. Our results pass several robustness checks including potential errors in the estimation of occupational automation and sub-sampling of occupations. Our study provides the first empirical law connecting two societal forces: urban agglomeration and automation's impact on employment

Mobilizing city-regional urbanization: The political economy of transportation and the Production of the metropolis in Chicago and Toronto

Studies of cities and urbanization are confronted with significant theoretical and methodological challenges as the urban question is reposed at the city-regional scale. Normative understandings of city-regions as sites of economic innovation and distinct political actors on the world stage belie the complex processes underlying their production. This has significant implications for social justice and political practice. This dissertation engages the challenges of city-regional urbanization through a critical comparative analysis of urban transportation institutions and infrastructure in the Chicago and Toronto city-regions. Focusing on long-term historical and spatial structures, the study demonstrates how multiscalar political, economic and social processes crystallize in specific urban formations and in tum, how processes of urbanization shape urban governance and practices of everyday life. The dissertation develops three central theoretical innovations. First, it introduces a geographical historical-materialist comparative framework to examine the contingent evolution of city-regional formations in space and across time using a cross-national perspective. Second, it reframes urban transportation as a key realm of political economy inquiry, redressing the limitations of traditional transportation geography and the poststructural approaches which dominate urban infrastructures literature. Third, it incorporates diverse urban, suburban and post-suburban spaces within an overarching theorization of city-regional urbanization as an expression of centripetal and centrifugal forces. Qualitative methods are used to uncover and analyze socially-entangled and geographically-disparate urban relations. The empirical analysis reveals that the prioritization of particular scales of mobility spurs the emergence of new city-regional topologies which do not neatly align with territorially-defined forms of state space. Strategies of regionalization are as likely to open new fissures in city-regional space as they are to fuse collective regional agency. The convergences and divergences witnessed between the Chicago and Toronto city-regions illustrate the place-specific path dependent properties of institutional and infrastructure fixes that highlight the importance of historically and geographically sensitive comparative research. The dissertation's dialectical and comparative contributions open the city-region as a multifaceted, multiscalar and multilayered object of analysis. It concludes by outlining how the study's dialectical approach to city-regional urbanization can inform debates on urban transformation and social change