The automobile passenger tire: a consumer's dilemma

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston Universit

The “Novel-Textbook”: Using a Novel as the Main Teaching Material in the Adult GFL Classroom

All rights reserved © 2017, Modern Greek Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.Much research in the field of Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) demonstrates that using literature as a teaching material in the Foreign Language (FL) classroom can contribute significantly to learning the target language. In particular, in the field of teaching Greek as a Foreign Language (GFL), the importance of using literature as a supplementary teaching material in the Greek language classroom and the practical considerations involved have been the focus of a number of papers in the last few years. The present paper wishes to suggest that the literary text and, in particular, the novel can also be used as an alternative to the traditional GFL textbook and, thus, form the central focus of instruction in a GFL course. It also suggests that the benefits of using literature in the GFL classroom can be fully exploited and extended when a “novel-textbook”1 is used as the main teaching material

Visual Odometry and Mapping in Natural Environments for Arbitrary Camera Motion Models

This is a thesis on outdoor monocular visual SLAM in natural environments. The techniques proposed herein aim at estimating camera pose and 3D geometrical structure of the surrounding environment. This problem statement was motivated by the GPS-denied scenario for a sea-surface vehicle developed at Plymouth University named Springer. The algorithms proposed in this thesis are mainly adapted for the Springer’s environmental conditions, so that the vehicle can navigate on a vision based localization system when GPS is not available; such environments include estuarine areas, forests and the occasional semi-urban territories. The research objectives are constrained versions of the ever-abiding problems in the fields of multiple view geometry and mobile robotics. The research is proposing new techniques or improving existing ones for problems such as scene reconstruction, relative camera pose recovery and filtering, always in the context of the aforementioned landscapes (i.e., rivers, forests, etc.). Although visual tracking is paramount for the generation of data point correspondences, this thesis focuses primarily on the geometric aspect of the problem as well as with the probabilistic framework in which the optimization of pose and structure estimates takes place. Besides algorithms, the deliverables of this research should include the respective implementations and test data for these algorithms in the form of a software library and a dataset containing footage of estuarine regions taken from a boat, along with synchronized sensor logs. This thesis is not the final analysis on vision based navigation. It merely proposes various solutions for the localization problem of a vehicle navigating in natural environments either on land or on the surface of the water. Although these solutions can be used to provide position and orientation estimates when GPS is not available, they have limitations and there is still a vast new world of ideas to be explored.UTC Aerospace System

On quaternion based parametrization of orientation in computer vision and robotics

The problem of orientation parameterization for applications in computer vision and robotics is examined in detail herein. The necessary intuition and formulas are provided for direct practical use in any existing algorithm that seeks to minimize a cost function in an iterative fashion. Two distinct schemes of parameterization are analyzed: The first scheme concerns the traditional axis-angle approach, while the second employs stereographic projection from unit quaternion sphere to the 3D real projective space. Performance measurements are taken and a comparison is made between the two approaches. Results suggests that there exist several benefits in the use of stereographic projection that include rational expressions in the rotation matrix derivatives, improved accuracy, robustness to random starting points and accelerated convergence