1,720,975 research outputs found
Autonomous Swarm Navigation
Full text linkRobotic swarm systems attract increasing attention in a wide variety of applications, where a multitude of self-organized robotic entities collectively accomplish sensing or exploration tasks. Compared to a single robot, a swarm system offers advantages in terms of exploration speed, robustness against single point of failures, and collective observations of spatio-temporal processes.
Autonomous swarm navigation, including swarm self-localization, the localization of external sources, and swarm control, is essential for the success of an autonomous swarm application. However, as a newly emerging technology, a thorough study of autonomous swarm navigation is still missing.
In this thesis, we systematically study swarm navigation systems, particularly emphasizing on their collective performance. The general theory of swarm navigation as well as an in-depth study on a specific swarm navigation system proposed for future Mars exploration missions are covered.
Concerning swarm localization, a decentralized algorithm is proposed, which achieves a near-optimal performance with low complexity for a dense swarm network.
Regarding swarm control, a position-aware swarm control concept is proposed. The swarm is aware of not only the position estimates and the estimation uncertainties of itself and the sources, but also the potential motions to enrich position information. As a result, the swarm actively adapts its formation to improve localization performance, without losing track of other objectives, such as goal approaching and collision avoidance.
The autonomous swarm navigation concept described in this thesis is verified for a specific Mars swarm exploration system. More importantly, this concept is generally adaptable to an extensive range of swarm applications
Superposition Mapping & Related Coding Techniques
Full text linkSince Shannon's landmark paper in 1948, it has been known that the capacity of a
Gaussian channel can be achieved if and only if the channel outputs are Gaussian. In the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, conventional mapping schemes suffice for approaching the Shannon limit, while in the high SNR regime, these mapping schemes, which produce uniformly distributed symbols, are insufficient to achieve the capacity. To solve this problem, researchers commonly resort to the technique of signal shaping that mends the symbol distribution, which is originally uniform, into a Gaussian-like one.
Superposition mapping (SM) refers to a class of mapping techniques which use linear superposition to load binary digits onto finite-alphabet symbols that are suitable for waveform transmission. Different from conventional mapping schemes, the output symbols of a superposition mapper can easily be made Gaussian-like, which effectively eliminates the necessity of active signal shaping. For this reason, superposition mapping is of great interest for theoretical research as well as for practical implementations. It is an attractive alternative to signal shaping for approaching the channel capacity in the high SNR regime.
This thesis aims to provide a deep insight into the principles of superposition
mapping and to derive guidelines for systems adopting it. Particularly, the influence of power allocation to the system performance, both w.r.t the achievable power efficiency and supportable bandwidth efficiency, is made clear. Considerable effort is spent on finding code structures that are matched to SM. It is shown that currently prevalent code design concepts, which are mostly derived for coded transmission with bijective uniform mapping, do not really fit with
superposition mapping, which is often non-bijective and nonuniform. As the main
contribution, a novel coding strategy called low-density hybrid-check (LDHC) coding is proposed. LDHC codes are optimal and universally applicable for SM with arbitrary type of power allocation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Iterative Pilot-Layer Aided Channel Estimation with Emphasis on Interleave-Division Multiple Access Systems
No full text Channel estimation schemes suitable for interleave-division multiple access (IDMA) systems are presented. Training and data are superimposed. Training-based and semiblind linear channel estimators are derived and their performance is discussed and compared. Monte Carlo simulation results are presented showing that the derived channel estimators in conjunction with a superimposed pilot sequence and chip-by-chip processing are able to track fast-fading frequency-selective channels. As opposed to conventional channel estimation techniques, the BER performance even improves with increasing Doppler spread for typical system parameters. An error performance close to the case of perfect channel knowledge can be achieved with high power efficiency.</p
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