1,348 research outputs found
Spacecraft Attitude Maneuver Planning Using Genetic Algorithms
A key enabling technology that leads to greater spacecraft autonomy is the capability to autonomously and optimally slew the spacecraft from and to different attitudes while operating under a number of celestial and dynamic constraints. The task of finding an attitude trajectory that meets all the constraints is a formidable one, in particular for orbiting or fly-by spacecraft where the constraints and initial and final conditions are of time-varying nature. This approach for attitude path planning makes full use of a priori constraint knowledge and is computationally tractable enough to be executed onboard a spacecraft. The approach is based on incorporating the constraints into a cost function and using a Genetic Algorithm to iteratively search for and optimize the solution. This results in a directed random search that explores a large part of the solution space while maintaining the knowledge of good solutions from iteration to iteration. A solution obtained this way may be used as is or as an initial solution to initialize additional deterministic optimization algorithms. A number of representative case examples for time-fixed and time-varying conditions yielded search times that are typically on the order of minutes, thus demonstrating the viability of this method. This approach is applicable to all deep space and planet Earth missions requiring greater spacecraft autonomy, and greatly facilitates navigation and science observation planning
Effects of geometric anisotropy on local field distribution: Ewald-Kornfeld formulation
We have applied the Ewald-Kornfeld formulation to a tetragonal lattice of
point dipoles, in an attempt to examine the effects of geometric anisotropy on
the local field distribution. The various problems encountered in the
computation of the conditionally convergent summation of the near field are
addressed and the methods of overcoming them are discussed. The results show
that the geometric anisotropy has a significant impact on the local field
distribution. The change in the local field can lead to a generalized
Clausius-Mossotti equation for the anisotropic case.Comment: Accepted for publications, Journal of Physics: Condensed Matte
The Impact of GPS Velocity Based Flight Control on Flight Instrumentation Architecture
This thesis explores the use of velocity information obtained by a Global Positioning System
(GPS) receiver to close the aircraft’s flight control loop. A novel framework to synthesize
attitude information from GPS velocity vector measurements is discussed. The
framework combines the benefits of high-quality GPS velocity measurements with a novel
velocity vector based flight control paradigm to provide a means for the human operator or
autopilot to close the aircraft flight control loop. Issues arising from limitations in GPS as
well as the presence of a human in the aircraft control loop are addressed.
Results from several flight tests demonstrate the viability of this novel concept and show
that GPS velocity based attitude allows for equivalent aircraft control as traditional attitude.
Two possible applications of GPS velocity based attitude, an autopilot and a tunnelin-
the-sky trajectory guidance system, are demonstrated in flight. Unlike traditional autopilot
and trajectory guidance systems, these applications rely solely on the information
obtained from a single-antenna GPS receiver which makes them affordable to the larger
General Aviation aircraft community. Finally, the impact of GPS velocity based flight control
on the instrumentation architecture of flight vehicles is investigated.Rockwell-Collins, NASA/FAA Joint University Program for Air Transportation, Draper Laborator
Learning cellular morphology with neural networks
Reconstruction and annotation of volume electron microscopy data sets of brain tissue is challenging but can reveal invaluable information about neuronal circuits. Significant progress has recently been made in automated neuron reconstruction as well as automated detection of synapses. However, methods for automating the morphological analysis of nanometer-resolution reconstructions are less established, despite the diversity of possible applications. Here, we introduce cellular morphology neural networks (CMNs), based on multi-view projections sampled from automatically reconstructed cellular fragments of arbitrary size and shape. Using unsupervised training, we infer morphology embeddings (Neuron2vec) of neuron reconstructions and train CMNs to identify glia cells in a supervised classification paradigm, which are then used to resolve neuron reconstruction errors. Finally, we demonstrate that CMNs can be used to identify subcellular compartments and the cell types of neuron reconstructions
Directing transport by polarized radiation in presence of chaos and dissipation
We study numerically the dynamics of particles on the Galton board of
semi-disk scatters in presence of monochromatic radiation and dissipation. It
is shown that under certain conditions the radiation leads to appearance of
directed transport linked to an underlining strange attractor. The direction of
transport can be efficiently changed by radiation polarization. The
experimental realization of this effect in asymmetric antidot superlattices is
discussed.Comment: revtex, 4 pages, 6 fig
Field-induced structure transformation in electrorheological solids
We have computed the local electric field in a body-centered tetragonal (BCT)
lattice of point dipoles via the Ewald-Kornfeld formulation, in an attempt to
examine the effects of a structure transformation on the local field strength.
For the ground state of an electrorheological solid of hard spheres, we
identified a novel structure transformation from the BCT to the face-centered
cubic (FCC) lattices by changing the uniaxial lattice constant c under the hard
sphere constraint. In contrast to the previous results, the local field
exhibits a non-monotonic transition from BCT to FCC. As c increases from the
BCT ground state, the local field initially decreases rapidly towards the
isotropic value at the body-centered cubic lattice, decreases further, reaching
a minimum value and increases, passing through the isotropic value again at an
intermediate lattice, reaches a maximum value and finally decreases to the FCC
value. An experimental realization of the structure transformation is
suggested. Moreover, the change in the local field can lead to a generalized
Clausius-Mossotti equation for the BCT lattices.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev.
Synaptic Cleft Segmentation in Non-Isotropic Volume Electron Microscopy of the Complete Drosophila Brain
Neural circuit reconstruction at single synapse resolution is increasingly
recognized as crucially important to decipher the function of biological
nervous systems. Volume electron microscopy in serial transmission or scanning
mode has been demonstrated to provide the necessary resolution to segment or
trace all neurites and to annotate all synaptic connections.
Automatic annotation of synaptic connections has been done successfully in
near isotropic electron microscopy of vertebrate model organisms. Results on
non-isotropic data in insect models, however, are not yet on par with human
annotation.
We designed a new 3D-U-Net architecture to optimally represent isotropic
fields of view in non-isotropic data. We used regression on a signed distance
transform of manually annotated synaptic clefts of the CREMI challenge dataset
to train this model and observed significant improvement over the state of the
art.
We developed open source software for optimized parallel prediction on very
large volumetric datasets and applied our model to predict synaptic clefts in a
50 tera-voxels dataset of the complete Drosophila brain. Our model generalizes
well to areas far away from where training data was available
Fractional Systems and Fractional Bogoliubov Hierarchy Equations
We consider the fractional generalizations of the phase volume, volume
element and Poisson brackets. These generalizations lead us to the fractional
analog of the phase space. We consider systems on this fractional phase space
and fractional analogs of the Hamilton equations. The fractional generalization
of the average value is suggested. The fractional analogs of the Bogoliubov
hierarchy equations are derived from the fractional Liouville equation. We
define the fractional reduced distribution functions. The fractional analog of
the Vlasov equation and the Debye radius are considered.Comment: 12 page
Fractional Liouville and BBGKI Equations
We consider the fractional generalizations of Liouville equation. The
normalization condition, phase volume, and average values are generalized for
fractional case.The interpretation of fractional analog of phase space as a
space with fractal dimension and as a space with fractional measure are
discussed. The fractional analogs of the Hamiltonian systems are considered as
a special class of non-Hamiltonian systems. The fractional generalization of
the reduced distribution functions are suggested. The fractional analogs of the
BBGKI equations are derived from the fractional Liouville equation.Comment: 20 page
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