Family budgets as sources for comparative social history: Western Europe - U.S.A. 1889-1937

Angaben über Einkommen und Ausgaben der Haushalte seit Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts werden oft als Illustrationen in sozialhistorischen Schriften benutzt, aber selten systematisch analysiert. Indem sie als zwei große Datenmassen individueller Haushaltspläne dargestellt werden, wird auf neue komparative Anwendungsmöglichkeiten für diese bedeutenden Quellen mikro-ökonomischer und Sozialgeschichte hingewiesen. Die Datenbasis über Deutschland berücksichtigt Vergleiche zwischen Berufsgruppen und speziell ausgewählten Gruppen über eine Zeitspanne von 1903 und 1937 hinweg. Die andere Datensammlung, die zuerst präsentiert wird, ist aus Daten von 1889/90 zusammengestellt und deckt die USA genauso ab wie Belgien, Frankreich, Deutschland, Großbritannien und die Schweiz. Damit fügt sie eine internationale und interethnische Dimension hinzu. Die Quellen, Zusammenstellungen und Begrenzungen der Datensammlungen werden getrennt dargestellt. Neuere Studien werden abschließend zusammen mit Perspektiven für ein geplantes Forschungsprojekt dargestellt. (KWübers.)'Income and expenditure data from family budgets since the mid 19th century are often used as illustrations in social historical writing, but seldom systematically analyzed. Presenting two large data bases of individual budgets, the authors point to new comparative uses for these major sources of micro-economic and social history. The data base on Germany allows for comparisons among occupational groups and among different cross-sections over time (from 1903 to 1937). The other set, presented first, is composed of data from 1889/1890, covering the U. S. as well as Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Switzerland, and adds an international and interethnic dimension. The sources, composition, and limitations of the data sets are outlined separately. Recent studies as well as perspectives for a planned research project are discussed at the end.' (author's abstract

Vom Konsum der Klasse zur Vielfalt der Stile: Haushaltsbudgetierung seit der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts

In Abkehr vom ökonomischen Modell der Konsumfunktion wurde in dem hier dokumentierten Forschungsprojekt die Variation des Konsums bei gleichem Einkommen untersucht, um näheres über die sozialen Determinanten von Konsummustern zu erfahren. Die empirische Basis bilden Sammlungen von Anschreibungen privater Haushalte von Arbeitern, Angestellten und Beamten zwischen 1899 und 1937 (5.120 Einzelbudgets). Aus der Sicht der hier vorgenommenen Analyse, die differentiellen Konsum unter der Maßgabe vergleichbarer Einkommenslagen untersucht, ist im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts von einer Zwei Klassen-Gesellschaft der Erwerbstätigen zu sprechen. Dabei erscheint die Arbeiterschaft weitgehend homogen, sie bildete in fast jeder Dimension des Konsumverhaltens zusammen mit den Beamten des unteren Dienstes eine Klasse proletarischer Arbeitnehmer. Dieser Klasse Erwerbstätiger stand ein Konglomerat von Berufsgruppen gegenüber, das hier als 'mittelbürgerlich' gekennzeichnet wird. Im Rahmen dieses 'bürgerlichen' Musters ergab sich eine gewisse Vielfalt konsumtiver Stilvarianten. Abschließend wird die Anschlußfähigkeit der vorgelegten Befunde zu aktuellen Ansätzen der Lebensstiltheorie verdeutlicht. (ICD)'Private consumption has been considered in the past decades usually following the question 'How is consumption affected by income?'. In this review is to establish the influence of social class on consumption. A date base was created especially to this purpose. It comprises about 5,000 private household budgets originating form separately published sources, 1901 to 1937. The heads of the household were members of the lower and middle classes who lived in cities and small towns in the German 'Reich'. The results of the analysis partly contradict some widely held assumptions. Though starting off from the premise of the working class being highly differentiated almost nothing like this could be proved in terms of household consumption. On the side of the civil service, there does emerge, even with incomes being the same, a consumption pattern clearly opposite to the proletarian one, but full of variety and not easily to be characterised. Some inferences about the emergence of post-war multiplicity of life-styles are attached to these findings.' (author's abstract

Wohin treibt der Nahe Osten? Politische Interessen und Ordnungskonzepte im Widerstreit: Konferenz am 22. und 24. November 2019 an der Europäischen Akademie Berlin; Verlaufsprotokoll der Vorträge und Diskussionen

Das folgende Protokoll der Konferenz "Wohin treibt der Nahe Osten?" in Berlin im November 2019 entstand aus den Notizen, die der Unterzeichnete als Konferenzteilnehmer für sich erstellt hatte. Insofern ist es das Ergebnis eines unvermeidbar selektiven Hörens. Nicht alles Wichtige, was gesagt wurde, kann sich in diesem Protokoll niedergeschrieben finden, und nicht jede Rednerin und jeder Redner wird sich hier zufriedenstellend wiedergegeben sehen. Indes entwickelte sich nach Ende der Konferenz der Wunsch, angesichts der Bedeutung, die das Thema hat, und im Hinblick auf die politischen Schlussfolgerungen, die aus Manchem, was gesagt wurde, zu ziehen wären, wenigstens einiges für künftige Verwendungen festzuhalten

Datasets and Benchmarking of a path planning pipeline for planetary rovers

We present datasets of 2.5D elevation maps of planetary environment that were collected on Mt. Etna during the space-analogous ARCHES mission [1]. In addition to the raw elevation maps, we provide cost maps that encode the traversibility of the terrain. We demonstrate how these cost maps are used during our development of mapping and planning algorithms for ground based robots in the context of the planetary rover navigation. More specifically, we use the benchmarking pipeline to evaluate the parameters and choice of methods that are used for the 2.5D cost map generation, which in turn affects the path planning behavior. Finally, we showcase how the provided maps can be supplied as a test environment in Bench-MR, which is a framework for benchmarking of motion planning algorithms for wheeled robots

Autonomous Rock Instance Segmentation for Extra-Terrestrial Robotic Missions

The collection and analysis of extra-terrestrial matter are two of the main motivations for space exploration missions. Due to the inherent risks for participating astronauts during space missions, autonomous robotic systems are often consid- ered as a promising alternative. In recent years, many (in- ter)national space missions containing rovers to explore celestial bodies have been launched. Hereby, the communication delay as well as limited bandwidth creates a need for highly self-governed agents that require only infrequent interaction with scientists at a ground station. Such a setting is explored in the ARCHES mis- sion, which seeks to investigate different means of collaboration between scientists and autonomous robots in extra-terrestrial environments. The analog mission focuses a team of hetero- geneous agents (two Lightweight Rover Units and ARDEA, a drone), which together perform various complex tasks under strict communication constraints. In this paper, we highlight three of these tasks that were successfully demonstrated during a one-month test mission on Mt. Etna in Sicily, Italy, which was chosen due to its similarity to the Moon in terms of geological structure. All three tasks have in common, that they leverage an instance segmentation approach deployed on the rovers to detect rocks within camera imagery. The first application is a map- ping scheme that incorporates semantically detected rocks into its environment model to safely navigate to points of interest. Secondly, we present a method for the collection and extraction of in-situ samples with a rover, which uses rock detection to localize relevant candidates to grasp. For the third task, we show the usefulness of stone segmentation to autonomously conduct a spectrometer measurement experiment. We perform a throughout analysis of the presented methods and evaluate our experimental results. The demonstrations on Mt. Etna show that our approaches are well suited for navigation, geological analysis, and sample extraction tasks within autonomous robotic extra-terrestrial missions

Robust place recognition with Gaussian Process Gradient Maps for teams of robotic explorers in challenging lunar environments

Teams of mobile robots will play a key role towards future planetary exploration missions. In fact, plans for upcoming lunar exploration, and other extraterrestrial bodies, foresee an extensive usage of robots for the purposes of in-situ analysis, building infrastructure and realizing maps of the environment for its exploitation. To enable prolonged robotic autonomy, however, it is critical for the robotic agents to be able to robustly localize themselves during their motion and, concurrently, to produce maps of the environment. To this end, visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) techniques have been developed during the years and found successful application in several terrestrial fields, such as autonomous driving, automated construction and agricultural robotics. To this day, autonomous navigation has been demonstrated in various robotic missions to Mars, e.g., from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Missions, to NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) and the current Mars2020 Perseverance, thanks to the implementation of Visual Odometry, using cameras to robustly estimate the rover's ego-motion. While VO techniques enable the traversal of large distances from one scientific target to the other, future operations, e.g., for building or maintenance of infrastructure, will require robotic agents to repeatedly visit the same environment. In this case, the ability to re-localize themselves with respect to previously visited places, and therefore the ability to create consistent maps of the environment, is paramount to achieve localization accuracies, that are far above what is achievable from global localization approaches. The planetary environment, however, poses significant challenges to this goal, due to extreme lighting conditions, severe visual aliasing and a lack of uniquely identifiable natural "features". For this reason, we developed an approach for re-localization and place recognition, that relies on Gaussian Processes, to efficiently represent portions of the local terrain elevation, named "GPGMaps" (Gaussian Process Gradient Maps), and to use its gradient in conjunction with traditional visual matching techniques. In this paper, we demonstrate, analyze and report the performances of our SLAM approach, based on GPGMaps, during the 2022 ARCHES (Autonomous Robotic Networks to Help Modern Societies) mission, that took place on the volcanic ash slopes of Mt. Etna, Sicily, a designated planetary analogous environment. The proposed SLAM system has been deployed for real-time usage on a robotic team that includes the LRU (Lightweight Rover Unit), a planetary-like rover with high autonomy, perceptual and locomotion capabilities, to demonstrate enabling technologies for future lunar applications

Fractional div-curl quantities and applications to nonlocal geometric equations

We investigate a fractional notion of gradient and divergence operator. We generalize the div-curl estimate by Coifman-Lions-Meyer-Semmes to fractional div-curl quantities, obtaining, in particular, a nonlocal version of Wente's lemma. We demonstrate how these quantities appear naturally in nonlocal geometric equations, which can be used to obtain a theory for fractional harmonic maps analogous to the local theory. Firstly, regarding fractional harmonic maps into spheres, we obtain a conservation law analogous to Shatah's conservation law and give a new regularity proof analogous to H\'elein's for harmonic maps into spheres. Secondly, we prove regularity for solutions to critical systems with nonlocal antisymmetric potentials on the right-hand side. Since the half-harmonic map equation into general target manifolds has this form, as a corollary, we obtain a new proof of the regularity of half-harmonic maps into general target manifolds following closely Rivi\`{e}re's celebrated argument in the local case. Lastly, the fractional div-curl quantities provide also a new, simpler, proof for H\"older continuity of $W^{s,n/s}$-harmonic maps into spheres and we extend this to an argument for $W^{s,n/s}$-harmonic maps into homogeneous targets. This is an analogue of Strzelecki's and Toro-Wang's proof for $n$-harmonic maps into spheres and homogeneous target manifolds, respectively

Testing for the MMX Rover Autonomous Navigation Experiment on Phobos

The MMX rover will explore the surface of Phobos, Mars´ bigger moon. It will use its stereo cameras for perceiving the environment, enabling the use of vision based autonomous navigation algorithms. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is currently developing the corresponding autonomous navigation experiment that will allow the rover to efficiently explore the surface of Phobos, despite limited communication with Earth and long turn-around times for operations. This paper discusses our testing strategy regarding the autonomous navigation solution. We present our general testing strategy for the software considering a development approach with agile aspects. We detail, how we ensure successful integration with the rover system despite having limited access to the flight hardware. We furthermore discuss, what environmental conditions on Phobos pose a potential risk for the navigation algorithms and how we test for these accordingly. Our testing is mostly data set-based and we describe our approaches for recording navigation data that is representative both for the rover system and also for the Phobos environment. Finally, we make the corresponding data set publicly available and provide an overview on its content

Preliminary Results for the Multi-Robot, Multi-Partner, Multi-Mission, Planetary Exploration Analogue Campaign on Mount Etna

This paper was initially intended to report on the outcome of the twice postponed demonstration mission of the ARCHES project. Due to the global COVID pandemic, it has been postponed from 2020, then 2021, to 2022. Nevertheless, the development of our concepts and integration has progressed rapidly, and some of the preliminary results are worthwhile to share with the community to drive the dialog on robotics planetary exploration strategies. This paper includes an overview of the planned 4-week campaign, as well as the vision and relevance of the missiontowards the planned official space missions. Furthermore, the cooperative aspect of the robotic teams, the scientific motivation, the sub task achievements are summarised

Finally! Insights into the ARCHES Lunar Planetary Exploration Analogue Campaign on Etna in summer 2022

This paper summarises the first outcomes of the space demonstration mission of the ARCHES project which could have been performed this year from 13 june until 10 july on Italy’s Mt. Etna in Sicily. After the second postponement related to COVID from the initially for 2020 planed campaign, we are now very happy to report, that the whole campaign with more than 65 participants for four weeks has been successfully conduced. In this short overview paper, we will refer to all other publication here on IAC22. This paper includes an overview of the performed 4-week campaign and the achieved mission goals and first results but also share our findings on the organisational and planning aspects