Verification of successive convexification algorithm

In this report, I describe a technique which allows a non-convex optimal control problem to be expressed and solved in a convex manner. I then verify the resulting solution to ensure its physical feasibility and its optimality. The original, non-convex problem is the fuel-optimal powered landing problem with aerodynamic drag. The non-convexities present in this problem include mass depletion dynamics, aerodynamic drag, and free final time. Through the use of lossless convexification and successive convexification, this problem can be formulated as a series of iteratively solved convex problems that requires only a guess of a final time of flight. The solution’s physical feasibility is verified through a nonlinear simulation built in Simulink, while its optimality is verified through the general nonlinear optimal control software GPOPS-II.Aerospace Engineerin

The University of North Carolina Intergenerational Legal Ethics Project: Expanding the Contexts for Teaching Professional Ethics and Values

The University of North Carolina Law School Intergenerational Legal Ethics Project (UNC Project) is an effort to identify new course concepts and structures and other curricular innovations that can bring education in professional values to a deeper, more personal level. The UNC project includes the premise that ethical learning is deep, internal learning

The Struggle For Judicial Independence in Antebellum North Carolina: The Story of Two Judges

On January 17, 2007, the Wayback Machine’s software crawler captured wikileaks.org for the first time. The crawler’s act of harvesting and documenting the Web meta-stored a developing site for “untraceable mass document leaking”—all in the form of an “anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents,” to quote the archived representational image of the site (Wayback Machine, 2007, para. 6). The initial WikiLeaks captures, and there were additional sweeps stored during the following months, vividly illustrate how WikiLeaks gradually developed into a site of global attention. The WikiLeaks logo, with its blue-green hourglass, was, for example, graphically present from the start, and later headings at the right were “news,” “FAQ,” “support,” “press,” and “links”—the latter directing users to various network services for anonymous data publication as i2P.net or Tor. Interestingly, links to the initial press coverage on Wikileaks are kept—which is not always the case at Wayback Machine—and can still be accessed. Apparently, one of the first online articles to mention what the site was about stated: “a new internet initiative called WikiLeaks seeks to promote good government and democratization by enabling anonymous disclosure and publication of confidential government records”

On a restriction problem of de Leeuw type for Laguerre multipliers

In 1965 K. de Leeuw \cite{deleeuw} proved among other things in the Fourier transform setting: {\it If a continuous function $m(\xi _1, \ldots ,\xi _n)$ on ${\bf R}^n$ generates a bounded transformation on $L^p({\bf R}^n),\; 1\le p \le \infty ,$ then its trace $\tilde{m}(\xi _1, \ldots ,\xi _m)=m(\xi _1, \ldots ,\xi _m,0,\ldots ,0), \; m<n,$ generates a bounded transformation on $L^p({\bf R}^m)$. } In this paper, the analogous problem is discussed in the setting of Laguerre expansions of different orders