Geologic information from satellite images

The author has identified the following significant results. Extracting geologic information from ERTS and Skylab/EREP images is best done by a geologist trained in photointerpretation. The information is at a regional scale, and three basic types are available: rock and soil, geologic structures, and landforms. Discrimination between alluvium and sedimentary or crystalline bedrock, and between units in thick sedimentary sequences is best, primarily because of topographic expression and vegetation differences. Discrimination between crystalline rock types is poor. Folds and fractures are the best displayed geologic features. They are recognizable by topographic expression, drainage patterns, and rock or vegetation tonal patterns. Landforms are easily discriminated by their familar shapes and patterns. It is possible to optimize the scale, format, spectral bands, conditions of acquisition, and sensor systems for best geologic interpretation. Several examples demonstrate the applicability of satellite images to tectonic analysis and petroleum and mineral exploration

Texas Business Review, July 1977

College Enrollment Shifts Anticipate Current Job Market; San Antonio: A Military, Trade and Service Center; The High Price of HousingBureau of Business Researc

On the completeness of ensembles of motion planners for decentralized planning

We provide a set of sufficient conditions to establish the completeness of an ensemble of motion planners-that is, a set of loosely-coupled motion planners that produce a unified result. The planners are assumed to divide the total planning problem across some parameter space(s), such as task space, state space, action space, or time. Robotic applications have employed ensembles of planners for decades, although the concept has not been formally unified or analyzed until now. We focus on applications in multi-robot navigation and collision avoidance. We show that individual resolutionor probabilistically-complete planners that meet certain communication criteria constitute a (respectively, resolution- or probabilistically-) complete ensemble of planners. This ensemble of planners, in turn, guarantees that the robots are free of deadlock, livelock, and starvation.Boeing Compan

Geologic and mineral and water resources investigations in western Colorado, using Skylab EREP data

The author has identified the following significant results. Skylab photographs are superior to ERTS images for photogeologic interpretation, primarily because of improved resolution. Lithologic contacts can be detected consistently better on Skylab S190A photos than on ERTS images. Color photos are best; red and green band photos are somewhat better than color-infrared photos; infrared band photos are worst. All major geologic structures can be recognized on Skylab imagery. Large folds, even those with very gentle flexures, can be mapped accurately and with confidence. Bedding attitudes of only a few degrees are recognized; vertical exaggeration factor is about 2.5X. Mineral deposits in central Colorado may be indicated on Skylab photos by lineaments and color anomalies, but positive identification of these features is not possible. S190A stereo color photography is adequate for defining drainage divides that in turn define the boundaries and distribution of ground water recharge and discharge areas within a basin

The Phytogeographical Significance of Some Rare Plants at Back Bay

The Back Bay region has long been recognized for its many species which reach either their northern or southern limits there. The eminent Harvard botanist M.L. Fernald collected extensively in the Back Bay region during the late 1930\u27s and early 1940\u27s. He postulated the Back Bay area provided a unique opportunity for the migration of fresh and brackish water species through a series of interconnected or neighboring marshes and pools. His collections document the presence of several species which we now consider extirpated. Of especial interest are genera with vicarious species pairs, that is, one area of overlap between wide-ranging species and southern species is at Back Bay. We present information on two such pairs: Lilaeopsis carolinensisand Lilaeopsis chinensis (wide-ranging); and Lippia nodiflora (southern) and Lippia lanceolata (wide-ranging). In addition we discuss species which reach their northern or southern limits at Back Bay. Examples include: Limosella subulata (Scrophulariaceae), a northern species which apparently has been extirpated, and Juncus megacephalus (Juncaceae), an endemic of the southeastern United States which is abundant near its northern limit at Back Bay

IkeaBot: An autonomous multi-robot coordinated furniture assembly system

We present an automated assembly system that directs the actions of a team of heterogeneous robots in the completion of an assembly task. From an initial user-supplied geometric specification, the system applies reasoning about the geometry of individual parts in order to deduce how they fit together. The task is then automatically transformed to a symbolic description of the assembly-a sort of blueprint. A symbolic planner generates an assembly sequence that can be executed by a team of collaborating robots. Each robot fulfills one of two roles: parts delivery or parts assembly. The latter are equipped with specialized tools to aid in the assembly process. Additionally, the robots engage in coordinated co-manipulation of large, heavy assemblies. We provide details of an example furniture kit assembled by the system.Boeing Compan

Single assembly robot in search of human partner: Versatile grounded language generation

We describe an approach for enabling robots to recover from failures by asking for help from a human partner. For example, if a robot fails to grasp a needed part during a furniture assembly task, it might ask a human partner to “Please hand me the white table leg near you.” After receiving the part from the human, the robot can recover from its grasp failure and continue the task autonomously. This paper describes an approach for enabling a robot to automatically generate a targeted natural language request for help from a human partner. The robot generates a natural language description of its need by minimizing the entropy of the command with respect to its model of language understanding for the human partner, a novel approach to grounded language generation. Our long-term goal is to compare targeted requests for help to more open-ended requests where the robot simply asks “Help me,” demonstrating that targeted requests are more easily understood by human partners

RF-compass: Robot object manipulation using RFIDs

Modern robots have to interact with their environment, search for objects, and move them around. Yet, for a robot to pick up an object, it needs to identify the object's orientation and locate it to within centimeter-scale accuracy. Existing systems that provide such information are either very expensive (e.g., the VICON motion capture system valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars) and/or suffer from occlusion and narrow field of view (e.g., computer vision approaches). This paper presents RF-Compass, an RFID-based system for robot navigation and object manipulation. RFIDs are low-cost and work in non-line-of-sight scenarios, allowing them to address the limitations of existing solutions. Given an RFID-tagged object, RF-Compass accurately navigates a robot equipped with RFIDs toward the object. Further, it locates the center of the object to within a few centimeters and identifies its orientation so that the robot may pick it up. RF-Compass's key innovation is an iterative algorithm formulated as a convex optimization problem. The algorithm uses the RFID signals to partition the space and keeps refining the partitions based on the robot's consecutive moves.We have implemented RF-Compass using USRP software radios and evaluated it with commercial RFIDs and a KUKA youBot robot. For the task of furniture assembly, RF-Compass can locate furniture parts to a median of 1.28 cm, and identify their orientation to a median of 3.3 degrees.National Science Foundation (U.S.

Rockhopper: a True HPC System with Cloud Concepts

Presented at IEEE Cluster 2013 in Indianapolis, INA number of services for scientific computing based on cloud resources have recently drawn significant attention in both research and infrastructure provider communities. Most cloud resources currently available lack true high performance characteristics, such as high-speed interconnects or storage. Researchers studying cloud systems have pointed out that many cloud services do not provide service level agreements that may meet the needs of the research community. Furthermore, the lack of location information provided to the user and the shared nature of the systems use may create risk for users of the system, in the instance that their data is moved to an unknown location with an unknown level of security. Indiana University and Penguin Computing have partnered to create a system, Rockhopper, which addresses many of these issues. This system is a true high performance resource, with on-demand allocations and control and tracking of jobs, situated at Indiana University's high-security datacenter facility. Rockhopper allows researchers to flexibly conduct their work under a number of use cases while also serving as an extension of cyberinfrastructure that scales from the researcher's local environment all the way up through large national resources. We describe the architecture and ideas behind the creation of the system, present a use case for campus bridging, and provide a typical example of system usage. In a comparison of Rockhopper to a cloud-based system, we run the Trinity RNA-seq software against a number of datasets on both the Rockhopper system and on Amazon's EC2 service

Morphology Of Striga Forbesii And Preliminary Screening For Resistance In Sorghum

Striga forbesii Benth can be a serious pest problem on sorghum in Southern Africa. Its morphology, as found in the region, was described with the mention of a very small population on the species having an unusual floral form with strongly exerted style and stigma. It thus could be possible that there is some outcrossing in this predominantly autogamous species. The species produces up to 24,654 seeds per plant, and its seed production was compared with that of S. asiatica. Observation nursery screening showed that between 2.0 and 20.0 (%) germplasm accessions, from Zimbabwe, Botswana Swaziland, Lesotho and Angola, have resistance to S. forbesii. In addition, only 6.0 (%) from the Alad nursery and 3.2 (%) from the Karper nursery, which were introduced into the region, showed resistance. Preliminary results from advanced screening trials significant differential reactions to S. forbesii attack among sorghum varieties. Using the modified checkerboard design, five varieties, namely SAR 29, SAR 33, SAR 19, SAR 35 and SAR 37, showed good levels of tolerance of resistance to S. forbesii. The different reactions of susceptibility and resistance or tolerance were discussed relative to the test varieties