72 research outputs found
Empirical evaluation of an autonomous vehicle in an urban environment
No full textOperation in urban environments creates unique challenges for research in autonomous ground vehicles. Due to the presence of tall trees and buildings in close proximity to traversable areas, GPS outage is likely to be frequent and physical hazards pose
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Building the Wilderness: Power, Water and Recreation in the Central Sierra Nevada Mountains
No full textThis project explores the shared history of the Stanislaus River canyon and the Emigrant Wilderness, two places in the mountains of central California that changed
the way Americans manage the country’s preserved wilderness. In both places, the
environmental conditions that made them popular destinations for outdoor recreation –
and, in turn, made them subjects of wilderness preservation campaigns – existed
thanks to human artifice and engineering. And in both cases, that engineered
infrastructure was connected to a single hydroelectric project in the heart of the Sierra
Nevada mountains completed shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. With
predictable and controlled water flows, the stretch of canyon downstream from the
project’s main power plant became in the 1970s the most popular rafting whitewater in
the American West and remains today a national symbol for river preservation. Fifty
years prior, the Emigrant Wilderness became a backcountry fisherman’s paradise
thanks to a collection of small, hand-built dams constructed by a former employee of
the company that built and maintained the electric power system. Both the canyon and
the wilderness were accessible largely due to roads, reservoirs and other infrastructure
built during the system’s initial construction and which remained over decades for its
maintenance. In both cases, the human origins of these wild places took center stage in
legal, political and regulatory contests over their preservation with one question
driving the conflicts – are dams compatible with the wilderness? In telling this story,
Building the Wilderness will cover approximately a century of people, places and
events in central California, beginning in its industrial landscape during the 1890s and
ending in its high-country wildlands in the early 2000s
A Formal Approach to Requirements-Based Programming
No full textNo significant general-purpose method is currently available to mechanically transform system requirements into a provably equivalent model. The widespread use of such a method represents a necessary step toward high-dependability system engineering for numerous application domains. Current tools and methods that start with a formal model of a system and mechanically produce a provably equivalent implementation are valuable but not sufficient. The "gap" unfilled by such tools and methods is that the formal models cannot be proven to be equivalent to the requirements. We offer a method for mechanically transforming requirements into a provably equivalent formal model that can be used as the basis for code generation and other transformations. This method is unique in offering full mathematical tractability while using notations and techniques that are well known and well trusted. Finally, we describe further application areas we are investigating for use of the approach
System and method for deriving a process-based specification
No full textA system and method for deriving a process-based specification for a system is disclosed. The process-based specification is mathematically inferred from a trace-based specification. The trace-based specification is derived from a non-empty set of traces or natural language scenarios. The process-based specification is mathematically equivalent to the trace-based specification. Code is generated, if applicable, from the process-based specification. A process, or phases of a process, using the features disclosed can be reversed and repeated to allow for an interactive development and modification of legacy systems. The process is applicable to any class of system, including, but not limited to, biological and physical systems, electrical and electro-mechanical systems in addition to software, hardware and hybrid hardware-software systems
Requirements to Design to Code: Towards a Fully Formal Approach to Automatic Code Generation
No full textA general-purpose method to mechanically transform system requirements into a provably equivalent model has yet to appear. Such a method represents a necessary step toward high-dependability system engineering for numerous possible application domains, including sensor networks and autonomous systems. Currently available tools and methods that start with a formal model of a system and mechanically produce a provably equivalent implementation are valuable but not sufficient. The gap that current tools and methods leave unfilled is that their formal models cannot be proven to be equivalent to the system requirements as originated by the customer. For the classes of systems whose behavior can be described as a finite (but significant) set of scenarios, we offer a method for mechanically transforming requirements (expressed in restricted natural language, or in other appropriate graphical notations) into a provably equivalent formal model that can be used as the basis for code generation and other transformations
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