Drift-Free Indoor Navigation Using Simultaneous Localization and Mapping of the Ambient Heterogeneous Magnetic Field

In the absence of external reference position information (e.g. GNSS) SLAM has proven to be an effective method for indoor navigation. The positioning drift can be reduced with regular loop-closures and global relaxation as the backend, thus achieving a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Although vision-based systems like laser scanners are typically deployed for SLAM, these sensors are heavy, energy inefficient, and expensive, making them unattractive for wearables or smartphone applications. However, the concept of SLAM can be extended to non-optical systems such as magnetometers. Instead of matching features such as walls and furniture using some variation of the ICP algorithm, the local magnetic field can be matched to provide loop-closure and global trajectory updates in a Gaussian Process (GP) SLAM framework. With a MEMS-based inertial measurement unit providing a continuous trajectory, and the matching of locally distinct magnetic field maps, experimental results in this paper show that a drift-free navigation solution in an indoor environment with millimetre-level accuracy can be achieved. The GP-SLAM approach presented can be formulated as a maximum a posteriori estimation problem and it can naturally perform loop-detection, feature-to-feature distance minimization, global trajectory optimization, and magnetic field map estimation simultaneously. Spatially continuous features (i.e. smooth magnetic field signatures) are used instead of discrete feature correspondences (e.g. point-to-point) as in conventional vision-based SLAM. These position updates from the ambient magnetic field also provide enough information for calibrating the accelerometer and gyroscope bias in-use. The only restriction for this method is the need for magnetic disturbances (which is typically not an issue indoors); however, no assumptions are required for the general motion of the sensor.Comment: ISPRS Workshop Indoor 3D 201

Neuron analysis of visual perception

The receptive fields of single cells in the visual system of cat and squirrel monkey were studied investigating the vestibular input affecting the cells, and the cell's responses during visual discrimination learning process. The receptive field characteristics of the rabbit visual system, its normal development, its abnormal development following visual deprivation, and on the structural and functional re-organization of the visual system following neo-natal and prenatal surgery were also studied. The results of each individual part of each investigation are detailed

How To Attain Maximum Profit In Minority Game?

What is the physical origin of player cooperation in minority game? And how to obtain maximum global wealth in minority game? We answer the above questions by studying a variant of minority game from which players choose among $N_c$ alternatives according to strategies picked from a restricted set of strategy space. Our numerical experiment concludes that player cooperation is the result of a suitable size of sampling in the available strategy space. Hence, the overall performance of the game can be improved by suitably adjusting the strategy space size.Comment: 4 pages in revtex 4 styl

Dyonic AdS black holes in maximal gauged supergravity

We present two new classes of dyonic anti-de Sitter black hole solutions of 4-dimensional maximal N=8, SO(8) gauged supergravity. They are: (1) static black holes of N=2, U(1)^4 gauged supergravity with 4 electric and 4 magnetic charges, with spherical, planar or hyperbolic horizons; and (2) rotating black holes of N=2, U(1)^2 gauged supergravity with 2 electric and 2 magnetic charges. We study their thermodynamics, and point out that the formulation of a consistent thermodynamics for dyonic anti-de Sitter black holes is dependent on the existence of boundary conditions for the gauge fields. We identify several distinct classes of boundary conditions for gauge fields in U(1)^4 supergravity. We study a general family of metrics containing the rotating solutions, and find Killing-Yano tensors with torsion in two conformal frames, which underlie separability.Comment: 23 pages, 3 Mathematica files of solutions; v2: minor change