129 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
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