3,051 research outputs found
UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024
The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp
Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure
A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium
Machine learning and mixed reality for smart aviation: applications and challenges
The aviation industry is a dynamic and ever-evolving sector. As technology advances and becomes more sophisticated, the aviation industry must keep up with the changing trends. While some airlines have made investments in machine learning and mixed reality technologies, the vast majority of regional airlines continue to rely on inefficient strategies and lack digital applications. This paper investigates the state-of-the-art applications that integrate machine learning and mixed reality into the aviation industry. Smart aerospace engineering design, manufacturing, testing, and services are being explored to increase operator productivity. Autonomous systems, self-service systems, and data visualization systems are being researched to enhance passenger experience. This paper investigate safety, environmental, technological, cost, security, capacity, and regulatory challenges of smart aviation, as well as potential solutions to ensure future quality, reliability, and efficiency
2023-2024 Undergraduate Catalog
2023-2024 undergraduate catalog for Morehead State University
AIRBODS: Findings and guidance for airborne infection resilience
This guidance provides insights into airborne infection risks and proposes mitigation measures to improve airborne infection resilience of indoor and semi-outdoor spaces. In some poorly-ventilated and/or highly occupied spaces, the provision of increased ventilation performance can be the key to reducing airborne infection risk down to 'acceptable' (although currently undefined) levels.This is a complex area of study with many areas of uncertainty that form the basis of ongoing research. That said, the AIRBODS programme, in the context of the global research efforts associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, has generated a sound basis for improving airborne infection resilience. Key aspects of the guide with its many recommendations include:•Experiments carried out in a test chamber showing how screens can improve or, even, worsen airborne infection risk.•Field studies undertaken as part of the Events Research Programme which underpinned the opening up of the UK hospitality sector in summer of 2021. Good practice advice is provided on how to drive high resolution CO2 and microbiological studies and then appropriately interpret results.• Analytical models were developed to understand how infection risk, using a mass balance approach with many different parameters, might be mitigated in some circumstances when compared to reference spaces. These models were then developed into a 'full building' tool which can be downloaded as part of this guidance.• Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models were developed to provide insights into the physics of droplets or aerosols at microscale.Following completion of a test chamber validation exercise, models were developed to investigate breathing or coughing mannequins at single human moving towards audience or crowd scale. Local ventilation effectiveness and associated airborne infection risk aspects of some real spaces may significantly differ from assumed 'fully-mixed' equivalent spaces. This, along with a number of other issues, will form part of ongoing research activities.• Focus groups were also used to provide some wider context and support some of our recommendations.AIRBODS has produced a repository of data and modelling methods with the mindset of enabling building professionals to inform their design and operation decisions towards improving airborne infection resilience in their buildings
2023-2024 Boise State University Undergraduate Catalog
This catalog is primarily for and directed at students. However, it serves many audiences, such as high school counselors, academic advisors, and the public. In this catalog you will find an overview of Boise State University and information on admission, registration, grades, tuition and fees, financial aid, housing, student services, and other important policies and procedures. However, most of this catalog is devoted to describing the various programs and courses offered at Boise State
Computational Intelligence for Cooperative Swarm Control
Over the last few decades, swarm intelligence (SI) has shown significant benefits in many practical applications. Real-world applications of swarm intelligence include disaster response and wildlife conservation. Swarm robots can collaborate to search for survivors, locate victims, and assess damage in hazardous environments during an earthquake or natural disaster. They can coordinate their movements and share data in real-time to increase their efficiency and effectiveness while guiding the survivors. In addition to tracking animal movements and behaviour, robots can guide animals to or away from specific areas. Sheep herding is a significant source of income in Australia that could be significantly enhanced if the human shepherd could be supported by single or multiple robots.
Although the shepherding framework has become a popular SI mechanism, where a leading agent (sheepdog) controls a swarm of agents (sheep) to complete a task, controlling a swarm of agents is still not a trivial task, especially in the presence of some practical constraints. For example, most of the existing shepherding literature assumes that each swarm member has an unlimited sensing range to recognise all other members’ locations. However, this is not practical for physical systems. In addition, current approaches do not consider shepherding as a distributed system where an agent, namely a central unit, may observe the environment and commu- nicate with the shepherd to guide the swarm. However, this brings another hurdle when noisy communication channels between the central unit and the shepherd af- fect the success of the mission. Also, the literature lacks shepherding models that can cope with dynamic communication systems. Therefore, this thesis aims to design a multi-agent learning system for effective shepherding control systems in a partially observable environment under communication constraints.
To achieve this goal, the thesis first introduces a new methodology to guide agents whose sensing range is limited. In this thesis, the sheep are modelled as an induced network to represent the sheep’s sensing range and propose a geometric method for finding a shepherd-impacted subset of sheep. The proposed swarm optimal herding point uses a particle swarm optimiser and a clustering mechanism to find the sheepdog’s near-optimal herding location while considering flock cohesion. Then, an improved version of the algorithm (named swarm optimal modified centroid push) is proposed to estimate the sheepdog’s intermediate waypoints to the herding point considering the sheep cohesion. The approaches outperform existing shepherding methods in reducing task time and increasing the success rate for herding.
Next, to improve shepherding in noisy communication channels, this thesis pro- poses a collaborative learning-based method to enhance communication between the central unit and the herding agent. The proposed independent pre-training collab- orative learning technique decreases the transmission mean square error by half in 10% of the training time compared to existing approaches. The algorithm is then ex- tended so that the sheepdog can read the modulated herding points from the central unit. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the new technique in time-varying noisy channels.
Finally, the central unit is modelled as a mobile agent to lower the time-varying noise caused by the sheepdog’s motion during the task. So, I propose a Q-learning- based incremental search to increase transmission success between the shepherd and the central unit. In addition, two unique reward functions are presented to ensure swarm guidance success with minimal energy consumption. The results demonstrate an increase in the success rate for shepherding
- …