Case Study: In Vitro Ruminal Fermentation Characteristics of Birdsfoot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus L.) Hay in Continuous Cultures

Abstract—Efficiently solving nonlinear least squares (NLS) problems is crucial for many applications in robotics. In online applications, solving the associated nolinear systems every step may become very expensive. This paper introduces online, incremental solutions, which take full advantage of the sparseblock structure of the problems in robotics. In general, the solution of the nonlinear system is approximated by incrementally solving a series of linearized problems. The most computationally demanding part is to assemble and solve the linearized system at each iteration. In our solution, this is mitigated by incrementally updating the factorized form of the linear system and changing the linearization point only if needed. The incremental updates are done using a resumed factorization only on the parts affected by the new information added to the system at every step. The sparsity of the factorized form directly affects the efficiency. In order to obtain an incremental factorization with persistent reduced fill-in, a new incremental ordering scheme is proposed. Furthermore, the implementation exploits the block structure of the problems and offers efficient solutions to manipulate block matrices, including a highly efficient Cholesky factorization on sparse block matrices. In this work, we focus our efforts on testing the method on SLAM applications, but the applicability of the technique remains general. The experimental results show that our implementation outperforms the state of the art SLAM implementations on all the tested datasets. I

Case Study:Effects of supplementing a fibrolytic feed enzyme on the growth performance andcarcass characteristics of beef steers

The objective of this study was to determine the growth performance of growing and finishing beef steers when fed with a fibrolytic feed enzyme (FFE)in a completely randomized design.This experiment was conducted during growing and finishing periods using 60group-penned Angus crossbred steers randomly assigned to treatments: control (no enzyme), low enzyme, and high enzyme.For the enzyme treatments, the FFE was added to the control diet at a dose of 1 or 2 g enzyme/kg DM TMR for the low-enzyme or high-enzyme treatment, respectively. Supplementing the grow-ing diet with FFE did not affect DMI regardless of dose rate. Body weight gain was not affected by FFE supplementation. Supplementation with FFE did not affect ADG and G:F. The overall growth performance during the finishing period was not influenced by the FFE, as was seen in the growing period. However, supplementation with FFE reduced 12th-rib fat thickness (P \u3c 0.01) and tended to decrease the marbling score (P = 0.14)across both enzyme doses. Supplementing the beef growing and finishing diets withFFE at 1 and 2 g/kg DM TMR did not affect growth performance and had minor effects on the carcass characteristics of beef steers