29 research outputs found
Implementing Conditional Inequality Constraints for Optimal Collision Avoidance
Current Federal Aviation Administration regulations require that passing aircraft must either meet a specified horizontal or vertical separation distance. However, solving for optimal avoidance trajectories with conditional inequality path constraints is problematic for gradient-based numerical nonlinear programming solvers since conditional constraints typically possess non-differentiable points. Further, the literature is silent on robust treatment of approximation methods to implement conditional inequality path constraints for gradient-based numerical nonlinear programming solvers. This paper proposes two efficient methods to enforce conditional inequality path constraints in the optimal control problem formulation and compares and contrasts these approaches on representative airborne avoidance scenarios. The first approach is based on a minimum area enclosing superellipse function and the second is based on use of sigmoid functions. These proposed methods are not only robust, but also conservative, that is, their construction is such that the approximate feasible region is a subset of the true feasible region. Further, these methods admit analytically derived bounds for the over-estimation of the infeasible region with a demonstrated maximum error of no greater than 0.3% using the superellipse method, which is less than the resolution of typical sensors used to calculate aircraft position or altitude. However, the superellipse method is not practical in all cases to enforce conditional inequality path constraints that may arise in the nonlinear airborne collision avoidance problem. Therefore, this paper also highlights by example when the use of sigmoid functions are more appropriate
Gene-partitioned maximum likelihood analysis
Maximum likelihood analysis of the four-marker data set (gene-partitioned), showing bootstrap support
psbA-trnH spacer alignment
psbA-trnH spacer multiple sequence alignmen
Maximum parsimony reconstruction of aril types
Maximum parsimony reconstruction of aril types, implemented in Mesquit
Maximum likelihood analysis of trnL-trnF spacer
Maximum likelihood analysis of trnL-trnF spacer, showing bootstrap suppor
Maximum likelihood analysis of matK
Maximum likelihood analysis of matK, showing bootstrap suppor