A Christian Apologetic to a Buddhist Christ

This is a paper that expands on the concept that Jesus may have been a Buddhist bodhisattva . It then gives a Christian apologetic as to why this cannot be true. This is accomplished by referencing the historical origins of Christianity and the differences between the lives of a bodhisattva and Jesus Christ

Rolling Stability of a Power-Generating Tumbleweed Rover

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140405/1/1.a32883.pd

Magnetic Navigation using Attitude-Invariant Magnetic Field Information for Loop Closure Detection

Indoor magnetic fields are a combination of Earth's magnetic field and disruptions induced by ferromagnetic objects, such as steel structural components in buildings. As a result of these disruptions, pervasive in indoor spaces, magnetic field data is often omitted from navigation algorithms in indoor environments. This paper leverages the spatially-varying disruptions to Earth's magnetic field to extract positional information for use in indoor navigation algorithms. The algorithm uses a rate gyro and an array of four magnetometers to estimate the robot's pose. Additionally, the magnetometer array is used to compute attitude-invariant measurements associated with the magnetic field and its gradient. These measurements are used to detect loop closure points. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can estimate the pose of a ground robot in an indoor environment within meter accuracy

On-manifold Decentralized State Estimation using Pseudomeasurements and Preintegration

This paper addresses the problem of decentralized, collaborative state estimation in robotic teams. In particular, this paper considers problems where individual robots estimate similar physical quantities, such as each other's position relative to themselves. The use of \emph{pseudomeasurements} is introduced as a means of modelling such relationships between robots' state estimates, and is shown to be a tractable way to approach the decentralized state estimation problem. Moreover, this formulation easily leads to a general-purpose observability test that simultaneously accounts for measurements that robots collect from their own sensors, as well as the communication structure within the team. Finally, input preintegration is proposed as a communication-efficient way of sharing odometry information between robots, and the entire theory is appropriate for both vector-space and Lie-group state definitions. The proposed framework is evaluated on three different simulated problems, and one experiment involving three quadcopters.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, submitted to IEE

Lagrangian Derivation of Variable-Mass Equations of Motion using an Arbitrary Attitude Parameterization

Lagrange’s equation is a popular method of deriving equations of motion due to the ability to choose a variety of generalized coordinates and implement constraints. When using a Lagrangian formulation, part of the generalized coordinates may describe the attitude. This paper presents a means of deriving the dynamics of variable-mass systems using Lagrange’s equation while using an arbitrary constrained attitude parameterization. The equivalence to well-known forms of the equations of motion is shown