Autonomous Mechanical Assembly on the Space Shuttle: An Overview

The space shuttle will be equipped with a pair of 50 ft. manipulators used to handle payloads and to perform mechanical assembly operations. Although current plans call for these manipulators to be operated by a human teleoperator. The possibility of using results from robotics and machine intelligence to automate this shuttle assembly system was investigated. The major components of an autonomous mechanical assembly system are examined, along with the technology base upon which they depend. The state of the art in advanced automation is also assessed

Digital Goods and the New Economy

Digital goods are bitstrings, sequences of 0s and 1s, which have economic value. They are distinguished from other goods by five characteristics: digital goods are nonrival, infinitely expansible, discrete, aspatial, and recombinant. The New Economy is one where the economics of digital goods importantly influence aggregate economic performance. This Article considers such influences not by hypothesizing ad hoc inefficiencies that the New Economy can purport to resolve, but instead by beginning from an Arrow-Debreu perspective and asking how digital goods affect outcomes. This approach sheds light on why property rights on digital goods differ from property rights in general, guaranteeing neither appropriate incentives nor social efficiency; provides further insight into why Open Source Software is a successful model of innovation and development in digital goods industries; and helps explain how geographical clustering matters.aspatial, emergence, idea, information, innovation, intellectual asset, Internet, knowledge, Open Source, weightless economy

Stochastic Digital Circuits for Probabilistic Inference

We introduce combinational stochastic logic, an abstraction that generalizes deterministic digital circuit design (based on Boolean logic gates) to the probabilistic setting. We show how this logic can be combined with techniques from contemporary digital design to generate stateless and stateful circuits for exact and approximate sampling from a range of probability distributions. We focus on Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for Markov random fields, using massively parallel circuits. We implement these circuits on commodity reconfigurable logic and estimate the resulting performance in time, space and price. Using our approach, these simple and general algorithms could be affordably run for thousands of iterations on models with hundreds of thousands of variables in real time

Special Libraries, October 1959

Volume 50, Issue 8https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1959/1007/thumbnail.jp

What can formal methods offer to digital flight control systems design

Formal methods research begins to produce methods which will enable mathematic modeling of the physical behavior of digital hardware and software systems. The development of these methods directly supports the NASA mission of increasing the scope and effectiveness of flight system modeling capabilities. The conventional, continuous mathematics that is used extensively in modeling flight systems is not adequate for accurate modeling of digital systems. Therefore, the current practice of digital flight control system design has not had the benefits of extensive mathematical modeling which are common in other parts of flight system engineering. Formal methods research shows that by using discrete mathematics, very accurate modeling of digital systems is possible. These discrete modeling methods will bring the traditional benefits of modeling to digital hardware and hardware design. Sound reasoning about accurate mathematical models of flight control systems can be an important part of reducing risk of unsafe flight control