Towards a Standardized Reinforcement Learning Framework for AAM Contingency Management

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is the next generation of air transportation that includes new entrants such as electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, increasingly autonomous flight operations, and small UAS package delivery. With these new vehicles and operational concepts comes a desire to increase densities far beyond what occurs today in and around urban areas, to utilize new battery technology, and to move toward more autonomously-piloted aircraft. To achieve these goals, it becomes essential to introduce new safety management system capabilities that can rapidly assess risk as it evolves across a span of complex hazards and, if necessary, mitigate risk by executing appropriate contingencies via supervised or automated decision-making during flights. Recently, reinforcement learning has shown promise for real-time decision making across a wide variety of applications including contingency management. In this work, we formulate the contingency management problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and integrate the contingency management MDP into the AAM-Gym simulation framework. This enables rapid prototyping of reinforcement learning algorithms and evaluation of existing systems, thus providing a community benchmark for future algorithm development. We report baseline statistical information for the environment and provide example performance metrics

Nuclear effects in electron reactions and their impact on neutrino processes

We suggest that superscaling in electroweak interactions with nuclei, namely the observation that the reduced electron-nucleus cross sections are to a large degree independent of the momentum transfer and of the nuclear species, can be used as a tool to obtain precise predictions for neutrino-nucleus cross sections in both charged and neutral current-induced processes.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, proceedings of NUINT09, 6th International Workshop of Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in the Few-Gev Region, Sitges (Spain), May 18-22, 200

Neutrino Interactions Importance for Nuclear Physics

We review the general interplay between Nuclear Physics and neutrino-nucleus cross sections at intermediate and high energies. The effects of different reaction mechanisms over the neutrino observables are illustrated with examples in calculations using several nuclear models and ingredients.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of 6th International Workshop on Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in the Few-GeV Region (NuInt09), Sitges, Spain, 18 - 22 May 200

The MIDAS experiment: A prototype for the microwave emission of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays

Recent measurements suggest that extensive air showers initiated by ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) emit signals in the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum caused by the collisions of the free-electrons with the atmospheric neutral molecules in the plasma produced by the passage of the shower. Such emission is isotropic and could allow the detection of air showers with 100% duty cycle and a calorimetric-like energy measurement, a significant improvement over current detection techniques. We have built MIDAS (MIcrowave Detection of Air Showers), a prototype of microwave detector, which consists of a 4.5 m diameter antenna with a cluster of 53 feed-horns in the 4 GHz range. The details of the prototype and first results will be presented.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of 12th Topical Seminar on Innovative Particle and Radiation Detectors (IPRD10), Siena, Italy, 7 - 10 June 201

PARTICLE DETECTORS BASED ON NOBLE LIQUIDS

In order to build a thin particle detector with 10 micron spatial resolution and automatic readout, the avalanche of ionization electrons in high electric fields in liquid argon and liquid xenon has been studied. We present a scheme using an array of points that could be used to make a reliable liquid argon filled detector. The avalanche pulses in liquid xenon have a rise time more than three orders of magnitude faster than that in liquid argon, suggesting that the positive charge carriers are holes, and making possible a detector with a time resolution of better than 100 nanoseconds. A direct observation of hole conduction is described

Search for microwave emission from ultrahigh energy cosmic rays

We present a search for microwave emission from air showers induced by ultrahigh energy cosmic rays with the microwave detection of air showers experiment. No events were found, ruling out a wide range of power flux and coherence of the putative emission, including those suggested by recent laboratory measurements.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

A Liquid Xenon Radiosotope Camera

The increasing availability of short lived gamma and positron emitting isotopes, coupled with the importance of dynamical studies and better imaging, has generated the need for an improved {gamma}-ray camera. The authors discuss a new type of {gamma}-ray camera which makes use of electron avalanches in liquid xenon. A configuration currently under development is shown in Figure 1. The successful operation of a liquid xenon proportional counter was recently reported. The liquid xenon camera promises better spatial resolution and higher counting rate than the existing NaI(Tl) scintillation camera. The spatial resolution for {gamma} rays is in principle limited only by the range of photoelectrons in liquid xenon, which is < 0.2 mm for energies < 1 MeV. A counting rate of 10{sup 6} C/s or more appears possible. As a result of the better resolution and high counting rate capability, the definition of the picture is improved. In addition, the high counting rate capability makes possible dynamic studies which were previously unfeasible. Although they expect the energy resolution with liquid xenon to be superior to that of NaI, the preliminary measurements show 17% FWHM for 279 keV {gamma}'s. Improvements are expected by using better geometry and smoother wire