The Ultrarelativistic Kerr-Geometry and its Energy-Momentum Tensor

The ultrarelativistic limit of the Schwarzschild and the Kerr-geometry together with their respective energy-momentum tensors is derived. The approach is based on tensor-distributions making use of the underlying Kerr-Schild structure, which remains stable under the ultrarelativistic boost.Comment: 16 pages, (AMS-LaTeX), TUW-94-0

Gallium Arsenide solar cell radiation damage experiment

Gallium arsenide (GaAs) solar cells for space applications from three different manufactures were irradiated with 10 MeV protons or 1 MeV electrons. The electrical performance of the cells was measured at several fluence levels and compared. Silicon cells were included for reference and comparison. All the GaAs cell types performed similarly throughout the testing and showed a 36 to 56 percent power areal density advantage over the silicon cells. Thinner (8-mil versus 12-mil) GaAs cells provide a significant weight reduction. The use of germanium (Ge) substrates to improve mechanical integrity can be implemented with little impact on end of life performance in a radiation environment

Abstractions of Constrained Linear Systems

Simulation relations are powerful abstraction techniques in computer science that reduce the complexity of analysis and design of labeled transition systems. In this paper, we define and characterize simulation relations for discrete-time linear systems in the presence of state and input constraints. Given a discrete-time linear system and the associated constraints, we consider a control-abstract embedding into a transition system. We then establish necessary and sufficient conditions for one constrained linear system to simulate the transitions of the other. Checking the simulation conditions is formulated as a linear programming problem which can be efficiently solved for systems of large dimensions. We provide an example where our approach is applied to the hybrid model of the Electronic Throttle Control (ETC) System

Extended Kalman Filter Implementation for the Khepera II Mobile Robot

The accurate estimation of robot position and orientation in real-time is one of the fundamental challenges in mobile robotics. The Extended Kalman Filter is a nonlinear real-time recursive time domain filter that combines available sensor data to produce an accurate estimate of state, and has been successfully applied to the localization problem in mobile robotics and aircraft navigation. This report describes an Extended Kalman Filter implementa- tion for the Khepera II mobile robotics platform that seeks to produce accurate localization estimates in real-time using wheel odometry data, IR sensor range data, and compass heading data

Retinal Vessel Segmentation Using the 2-D Morlet Wavelet and Supervised Classification

We present a method for automated segmentation of the vasculature in retinal images. The method produces segmentations by classifying each image pixel as vessel or non-vessel, based on the pixel's feature vector. Feature vectors are composed of the pixel's intensity and continuous two-dimensional Morlet wavelet transform responses taken at multiple scales. The Morlet wavelet is capable of tuning to specific frequencies, thus allowing noise filtering and vessel enhancement in a single step. We use a Bayesian classifier with class-conditional probability density functions (likelihoods) described as Gaussian mixtures, yielding a fast classification, while being able to model complex decision surfaces and compare its performance with the linear minimum squared error classifier. The probability distributions are estimated based on a training set of labeled pixels obtained from manual segmentations. The method's performance is evaluated on publicly available DRIVE and STARE databases of manually labeled non-mydriatic images. On the DRIVE database, it achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.9598, being slightly superior than that presented by the method of Staal et al.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures and 1 table. Accepted for publication in IEEE Trans Med Imag; added copyright notic