Behavior Trees for UAV Mission Management

Behavior trees are a recent development in artificial intelligence for computer games. Their application has been proposed to increase modularity of an unmanned aerial vehicle's control system. This paper first describes advantages of behavior trees for use in mission management. The paper then points out research towards their deployment. Finally, newly developed transient tasks are introduced to behavior trees. These allow for finite-state-machine-like initialization and interruption of tasks. The use of the system is demonstrated with an unmanned aircraft mission simulation

On the convergence of local expansions of layer potentials

In a recently developed quadrature method (quadrature by expansion or QBX), it was demonstrated that weakly singular or singular layer potentials can be evaluated rapidly and accurately on surface by making use of local expansions about carefully chosen off-surface points. In this paper, we derive estimates for the rate of convergence of these local expansions, providing the analytic foundation for the QBX method. The estimates may also be of mathematical interest, particularly for microlocal or asymptotic analysis in potential theory

How to Shape Noise Spectra for Continuous System Simulation

Noise for continuous-time system simulation is relevant for many applications, where time-domain results are required. Simulating such noise raises the need to consistently shape the frequency content of the signal. However, the methods for this task are not obvious and often state space implementations of form filters are approximated. In this paper, we address the problem with a new method relying on directly using the specified power spectral density for a convolution filter. For the example of railway track irregularities, we explain how to derive the required filters, implement them in the open-source Noise library, and verify the results. The new method produces correct results, is very simple to use, and enables new features for time simulation of physical systems