Flight control system rapid prototyping for the remotely-controlled elettra-twin-flyer airship

Nautilus S.p. A. is a small company investing in the design and development of a low-cost multipurpose multi-mission platform, known as Elettra-Twin-Flyer, which is a very innovative radio-controled airship, equipped with high precision sensors and telecommunication devices. In the prototype phase, Nautilus policy is oriented towards a massive employment of external collaborators to reduce the development costs. The crucial problem of this kind of management is the harmonious integration of all the teams involved on the project. This paper describes the integration process of the PC-104 on-board computer with the avionic devices, which are electronic systems characterized by complex communication protocols. Attention is focused on the testing, verification, validation and final translation of the embedded control software into the on-board computer, through techniques derived from the automatic code generation, such as Rapid Prototyping and Hardware-In-the-Loop. Copyright © 2006 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved

Learning logic programs with negation as failure

Normal logic programs are usually shorter and easier to write and understand than definite logic programs. As a consequence, it is worth investigating their learnability, if Inductive Logic Program- ming is to be proposed as an alternative tool for software development and Software Engineering at large. In this paper we present an exten- sion of the ILP system TRACY, called TRACY-not, able to learn normal logic programs. The method is proved to be sound, in the sense that it outputs a program which is complete and consistent w.r.t.the ex- amples, and complete, in the sense that it does find a solution when it exists. Compared to learning systems based on extensionality,TRACY and TRACY not are less dependent on the kind and number of training examples, which is due to the intensional evaluation of the hypothe- ses and, for TRACY-not, to the possibility to have restricted hypothesis spaces through the use of negation