Air vehicle simulator: an application for a cable array robot

The development of autonomous air vehicles can be an expensive research pursuit. To alleviate some of the financial burden of this process, we have constructed a system consisting of four winches each attached to a central pod (the simulated air vehicle) via cables - a cable-array robot. The system is capable of precisely controlling the three dimensional position of the pod allowing effective testing of sensing and control strategies before experimentation on a free-flying vehicle. In this paper, we present a brief overview of the system and provide a practical control strategy for such a system. ©2005 IEEE

Occupancy grids from stereo and optical flow data

voir basilic : http://emotion.inrialpes.fr/bibemotion/2006/BPUCL06/ address: Rio de Janeiro (BR)In this paper, we propose a real-time method to detect obstacles using theoretical models of the ground plane, first in a 3D point cloud given by a stereo camera, and then in an optical flow field given by one of the stereo pair's camera. The idea of our method is to combine two partial occupancy grids from both sensor modalities with an occupancy grid framework. The two methods do not have the same range, precision and resolution. For example, the stereo method is precise for close objects but cannot see further than 7 m (with our lenses), while the optical flow method can see considerably further but has lower accuracy. Experiments that have been carried on the CyCab mobile robot and on a tractor demonstrate that we can combine the advantages of both algorithms to build local occupancy grids from incomplete data (optical flow from a monocular camera cannot give depth information without time integration)

Dynamic nuclear polarization at the edge of a two-dimensional electron gas

We have used gated GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures to explore nonlinear transport between spin-resolved Landau level (LL) edge states over a submicron region of two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). The current I flowing from one edge state to the other as a function of the voltage V between them shows diode-like behavior---a rapid increase in I above a well-defined threshold V_t under forward bias, and a slower increase in I under reverse bias. In these measurements, a pronounced influence of a current-induced nuclear spin polarization on the spin splitting is observed, and supported by a series of NMR experiments. We conclude that the hyperfine interaction plays an important role in determining the electronic properties at the edge of a 2DEG.Comment: 8 pages RevTeX, 7 figures (GIF); submitted to Phys. Rev.

Electronic correlation in the quantum Hall regime

Two-dimensional interacting electron systems become strongly correlated if the electrons are subject to a perpendicular high magnetic field. After introducing the physics of the quantum Hall regime the incompressible many- particle ground state and its excitations are studied in detail at fractional filling factors for spin-polarized electrons. The spin degree of freedom whose importance was shown in recent experiments is considered by studying the thermodynamics at filling factor one and near one.Comment: 55 pages, 26 eps-figure

Paranoia as a deficit in non-social belief updating

Paranoia is the belief that harm is intended by others. It may arise from selective pressures to infer and avoid social threats, particularly in ambiguous or changing circumstances. We propose that uncertainty may be sufficient to elicit learning differences in paranoid individuals, without social threat. We used reversal learning behavior and computational modeling to estimate belief updating across individuals with and without mental illness, online participants, and rats chronically exposed to methamphetamine, an elicitor of paranoia in humans. Paranoia is associated with a stronger prior on volatility, accompanied by elevated sensitivity to perceived changes in the task environment. Methamphetamine exposure in rats recapitulates this impaired uncertainty-driven belief updating and rigid anticipation of a volatile environment. Our work provides evidence of fundamental, domain-general learning differences in paranoid individuals. This paradigm enables further assessment of the interplay between uncertainty and belief-updating across individuals and species

Screening out irrelevant cell-based models of disease

The common and persistent failures to translate promising preclinical drug candidates into clinical success highlight the limited effectiveness of disease models currently used in drug discovery. An apparent reluctance to explore and adopt alternative cell-and tissue-based model systems, coupled with a detachment from clinical practice during assay validation, contributes to ineffective translational research. To help address these issues and stimulate debate, here we propose a set of principles to facilitate the definition and development of disease-relevant assays, and we discuss new opportunities for exploiting the latest advances in cell-based assay technologies in drug discovery, including induced pluripotent stem cells, three-dimensional (3D) co-culture and organ-on-a-chip systems, complemented by advances in single-cell imaging and gene editing technologies. Funding to support precompetitive, multidisciplinary collaborations to develop novel preclinical models and cell-based screening technologies could have a key role in improving their clinical relevance, and ultimately increase clinical success rates

Visual homing for a car-like vehicle

This thesis addresses the pose stabilization of a car-like vehicle using omnidirectional visual feedback. The presented method allows a vehicle to servo to a pre-learnt target pose based on feature bearing angle and range discrepancies between the vehicle's current view of the environment and that seen at the learnt location. The best example of such a task is the use of visual feedback for autonomous parallel-parking of an automobile. Much of the existing work in pose stabilization is highly theoretical in nature with few examples of implementations on 'real' vehicles, let alone vehicles representative of those found in industry. The work in this thesis develops a suitable test platform and implements vision-based pose stabilization techniques. Many of the existing techniques were found to fail due to vehicle steering and velocity loop dynamics, and more significantly, with steering input saturation. A technique which does cope with the characteristics of 'real' vehicles is to divide the task into predefined stages, essentially dividing the state space into sub-manifolds. For a car-like vehicle, the strategy used is to stabilize the vehicle to the line which has the correct orientation and contains the target location. Once on the line, the vehicle then servos to the desired pose. This strategy can accommodate velocity and steering loop dynamics, and input saturation. It can also allow the use of linear control techniques for system analysis and tuning of control gains. To perform pose stabilization, good estimates of vehicle pose are required. A simple, yet robust, method derived from the visual homing literature is to sum the range vectors to all the landmarks in the workspace and divide by the total number of landmarks--the Improved Average Landmark Vector. By subtracting the IALV at the target location from the currently calculated IALV, an estimate of vehicle pose is obtained. In this work, views of the world are provided by an omnidirectional camera, while a magnetic compass provides a reference direction. The landmarks used are red road cones which are segmented from the omnidirectional colour images using a pre-learnt, two-dimensional lookup table of their colour profile. Range to each landmark is estimated using a model of the optics of the system, based on a flat-Earth assumption. A linked-list based method is used to filter the landmarks over time. Complementary filtering techniques, which combine the vision data with vehicle odometry, are used to improve the quality of the measurements

Tracking road edges in the panospheric image plane

This paper presents a technique for tracking road edges in a panoramic image sequence. The major contribution is that instead of unwarping the image to find parallel lines representing the road edges, we choose to warp the parallel groundplane lines into the image plane of the equiangular panospheric camera. Updating the parameters of the line thus involves searching a very small number of pixels in the panoramic image, requiring considerably less computation than unwarping. Results using real-world images, including shadows, intersections and curves, are presented

In the rough: in-field evaluation of an autonomous vehicle for golf course maintenance

Maintenance is a time consuming and expensive task for any golf course or driving range manager. For a golf course the primary tasks are grass mowing and maintenance (fertilizer and herbicide spreading), while for a driving range mowing, maintenance and ball collection are required. All these tasks require an operator to drive a vehicle along paths which are generally predefined. This paper presents some preliminary in-field tsting results for an automated tractor vehicle performing golf ball collection on an actual driving range, and mowing on difficult unstructured terrain