29,206 research outputs found
Increasing granular flow rate with obstructions
We describe a simple experiment involving spheres rolling down an inclined
plane towards a bottleneck and through a gap. Results of the experiment
indicate that flow rate can be increased by placing an obstruction at optimal
positions near the bottleneck. We use the experiment to develop a computer
simulation using the PhysX physics engine. Simulations confirm the experimental
results and we state several considerations necessary to obtain a model that
agrees well with experiment. We demonstrate that the model exhibits clogging,
intermittent and continuous flow, and that it can be used as a tool for further
investigations in granular flow.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
Cooperative Control and Potential Games
We present a view of cooperative control using the language of learning in games. We review the game-theoretic concepts of potential and weakly acyclic games, and demonstrate how several cooperative control problems, such as consensus and dynamic sensor coverage, can be formulated in these settings. Motivated by this connection, we build upon game-theoretic concepts to better accommodate a broader class of cooperative control problems. In particular, we extend existing learning algorithms to accommodate restricted action sets caused by the limitations of agent capabilities and group based decision making. Furthermore, we also introduce a new class of games called sometimes weakly acyclic games for time-varying objective functions and action sets, and provide distributed algorithms for convergence to an equilibrium
Map-Aware Models for Indoor Wireless Localization Systems: An Experimental Study
The accuracy of indoor wireless localization systems can be substantially
enhanced by map-awareness, i.e., by the knowledge of the map of the environment
in which localization signals are acquired. In fact, this knowledge can be
exploited to cancel out, at least to some extent, the signal degradation due to
propagation through physical obstructions, i.e., to the so called
non-line-of-sight bias. This result can be achieved by developing novel
localization techniques that rely on proper map-aware statistical modelling of
the measurements they process. In this manuscript a unified statistical model
for the measurements acquired in map-aware localization systems based on
time-of-arrival and received signal strength techniques is developed and its
experimental validation is illustrated. Finally, the accuracy of the proposed
map-aware model is assessed and compared with that offered by its map-unaware
counterparts. Our numerical results show that, when the quality of acquired
measurements is poor, map-aware modelling can enhance localization accuracy by
up to 110% in certain scenarios.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 1 table. IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communications, 201
Increasing State Restrictions on Russian Protestant Seminaries
In sum, Russian Protestant seminaries are presently undergoing a trial by state inspection that threatens their very existence. Academics Perry Glanzer and Konstantin Petrenko are correct in asserting that the Russian state’s “power to license and accredit” is “the power of life and death” over any educational institution.
State justifications for close oversight of Protestant seminaries appear overstated at best and lack credibility at worst. As regards state concerns for quality control, should not the Russian constitution’s requirement for separation of church and state take precedence over a secular government’s presumption to instruct believers on how best to train their clergy
Jointly Optimizing Placement and Inference for Beacon-based Localization
The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide
variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable,
measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of
estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a
beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in
the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and
potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these
design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly
searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are
optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally
expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer
that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us
to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the
joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and
settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high
localization accuracy.Comment: Appeared at 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS
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