Crane motion induces payload oscillation that makes accurate positioning of the payload a challenging task. As the payload size increases, it may be necessary to utilize multiple cranes for better control of the payload position and orientation. However, simultaneously maneuvering multiple cranes to transport a single payload increases the complexity and danger of the operation. This thesis investigates the dynamics and control of dual-hoist bridge cranes transporting distributed payloads. Insights from this dynamic analysis were used to design input shapers that reduce payload oscillation originating from various crane motions. Also, studies were conducted to investigate the effect input shaping has on the performance of human operators using a dual-hoist bridge crane to transport distributed payloads through an obstacle course. In each study, input shaping significantly improved the task completion time. Furthermore, input-shaping control greatly decreased operator effort, as measured by the number of interface button pushes needed to complete a task. These results clearly demonstrate the benefit of input-shaping control on dual-hoist bridge cranes. In addition, a new system identification method that utilizes input shaping for determining the modal frequencies and relative amplitude contributions of individual modes was developed to aid in the dynamic analysis of dual-hoist bridge cranes, as well as other multi-mode systems. This method uses a new type of input shaper to suppress all but one mode to a low level. The shaper can also be used to bring a small-amplitude mode to light by modifying one of the vibration constraints.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / Reliable System Services Corporation (RSS Corp.) presents the feasibility of a low cost, low power, high capacity, robust RF Communications Network using SATCOM and UAV relays. The developed architecture will be suitable for OTH Large Area Test and Training exercises as well as applications for OTH Digital Battlefield scenarios. A specific application is shown for the planned Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) missions, although the developed architecture will have broader applications for any surface combatant requiring an Over-the-Horizon (OTH) data link to distributed players and sensors. A conceptual design for the IP network radio system will implement RSS Corp. developed secure IRIDIUM global full duplex data links and Harris Corp. developed long range high bandwidth 802.11 full duplex data links. The results will be significant, and the developed system could be a cornerstone of the future digital battlefield combat communications architecture. The developed technology will also have significant use in any application for Test, Evaluation and Training Ranges requiring net centric, command/control and wide bandwidth TLM data collection from distributed remote players and sensors.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / There is an increasing desire in many organizations, including NASA and the DoD, to use constellations or fleets of autonomous spacecraft working together to accomplish complex mission objectives. At the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate we are investigating and developing architectures for commanding and controlling a cluster of cooperating satellites. For many space missions, large monolithic satellites are required to meet mission requirements. In many cases this results in costly satellites which are more complex, more susceptible to failure, and which have performance characteristics that are less than optimal due to realistic physical size limitations. Recently various organizations have begun to explore how distributed clusters of cooperating satellites can replace their larger monolithic counterparts resulting in an overall cost reduction, enhanced mission performance, and increased system fault tolerance. Large clusters of satellites flying in formation are required to have some level of on-board autonomy in order to: fly within specified tolerance levels; perform collision avoidance; address fault detection, isolation, and resolution (FDIR); share knowledge; and plan and schedule activities. In addition, from an operations standpoint, commanding and controlling a large cluster of satellites can be very burdensome for ground operators. At AFRL we are addressing these issues by development of an on-board Cluster Management system which will, in essence, provide the capability to treat a cluster of satellites as a single virtual satellite. A systems level approach is being taken, therefore from a ground perspective the ground control station must also be able to treat the cluster as a virtual satellite. [1] This paper will describe our Cluster Management system, which is the intelligent entity that is responsible for making cluster level decisions and which enables the satellite cluster to function as a virtual satellite. The cluster manager functionality can be broken down into the following five areas: • Command and control • Cluster data management • Formation flying • Fault management • On-board Planning This paper will contain a detailed description of the Cluster Manager architecture along with its various modules.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The first airship was invented and designed in 1852 by Henri Giffard, a French engineer. Airships were used by both the Allied and German military for surveillance and bomb dropping in WWI. There was a steady increase in airship use up until the Hindenburg exploded while docking in 1937 at Lakehurst, New Jersey. This tragedy almost ended the use of airships. Significant use of airships next occurred during WWII for submarine surveillance and depth charging. Airships for advertising, surveillance, and command control came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Airships can be fitted with several telemetry options or instrumented with sensor systems for surveillance purposes. The telemetry or sensor data can be relayed, real-time, to a remote station as much as 150 km from the airship either encrypted or plain when cruising at 3000 feet altitude. Small vehicles (3 meters long) can be detected at 50 km using radar; 12 km using FLIRs; and, depending on weather conditions and real-time imaging processing, up to 20 km using video cameras. Cooperating airborne targets can be tracked out to 150 km. The major advantages of the airship over conventional aircraft are: • ENDURANCE Up to 20 hours without refueling. • LOW OPERATING COST Less than the cost of a helicopter. • SHOCK-FREE ENVIRONMENT Allows commercial electric equipment usage. • VIBRATION-FREE ENVIRONMENT Yields personnel comfort and endurance. • SAFETY Safer than any aircraft, automobile, or bicycle.

<p>Flexibility is the keyword when preparing for the uncertainfuture tasks for the civilian and military defence. Supporttools relying on general principles will greatlyfacilitateflexible co-ordination and co-operation between differentcivilian and military organizations, and also between differentcommand levels. Further motivations for general solutionsinclude reduced costs for technical development and training,as well as faster and more informed decisionmaking. Mosttechnical systems that support military activities are howeverdesigned with specific work tasks in mind, and are consequentlyrather inflexible. There are large differences between forinstance fire fighting, disaster relief, calculating missiletrajectories, and navigating large battle-ships. Still, thereought to be much in common in the work of managing thesevarious tasks. We use the term<i>Command and Control</i>(C2) to capture these commonfeatures in management of civilian and military, rescue anddefence operations.</p><p>Consequently, this thesis describes a top-down approach tosupport systems for decision-making in the context of C2, as acomplement to the prevailing bottom-up approaches. DISCCO(Decision Support for Command and Control) is a set ofnetwork-based services including<i>Command Support</i>helping commanders in the human,cooperative and continuous process of evolving, evaluating, andexecuting solutions to their tasks. The command tools providethe means to formulate and visualize tasks, plans, andassessments, but also the means to visualize decisions on thedynamic design of organization. Also included in DISCCO is<i>Decision Support</i>, which, based on AI and simulationtechniques, improve the human process by integrating automaticand semiautomatic generation and evaluation of plans. The toolsprovided by DISCCO interact with a<i>Common Situation Model</i>capturing the recursive structureof the situation, including the status, the dynamicorganization, and the intentions, of own, allied, neutral, andhostile resources. Hence, DISCCOprovides a more comprehensivesituation description than has previously been possible toachieve.</p><p>DISCCO shows generic features since it is designed tosupport a decisionmaking process abstracted from the actualkinds and details of the tasks that are solved. Thus it will beuseful through all phases of the operation, through all commandlevels, and through all the different organizations andactivities that are involved.</p><p><b>Keywords:</b>Command and Control, Management, DecisionSupport, Data Fusion, Information Fusion, Situation Awareness,Network-Based Defence, Ontology.</p>

Humans have a strong natural ability to remember item locations. In graphical user interfaces, this ability is one of the primary mechanisms by which users become efficient. However, there are two ways in which modern applications often fail to exploit the potential of spatial memory. First, they overuse hierarchical structures such as cascading menus, which slows down interaction for expert users who already know item locations; and second, they move items around, most commonly in response to changing display geometry. The three goals of this thesis are therefore to (1) develop a better understanding of human spatial memory in the context of user interfaces; (2) design and validate efficient command-selection interfaces based on the strength of spatial memory; and (3) design and validate interface strategies that allow users to maintain spatial memory even when display geometry changes. Addressing goal (1), a comprehensive literature review of spatial memory for user interfaces is presented. The review covers underlying psychological models of spatial memory, the observable properties of spatial memory, and existing applications of spatial memory to human-computer interaction. In addition to informing the research in this thesis, the review is intended to provide a useful summary of the state of spatial memory research for scientists in HCI, as well as providing a set of design guidelines on spatial memory for practitioners. Addressing goal (2), this thesis presents the design and evaluation of two related user interface techniques, CommandMaps and StencilMaps. The CommandMap is a spatially stable interface with a flattened hierarchy, intended as a replacement for cascading menu systems. Theoretical performance predictions indicate that CommandMaps should be significantly faster than traditional user interfaces such as menus and the Microsoft Office Ribbon, and laboratory-based empirical studies of command selection confirm these predictions. These positive results motivated the design and implementation of two real-world CommandMap user interfaces based on Microsoft Word and Pinta (an open-source image editing application). Evaluation results confirmed that CommandMaps continue to demonstrate performance and subjective advantages in the context of actual tasks, including interleaved command selection, typing, and direct manipulation. Qualitative data gathered from interviews, questionnaires, and conversations provide substantial insight into users' reactions to CommandMaps, leading to a set of design recommendations regarding when and how they should be implemented in real applications. One design limitation identified during CommandMap evaluations was that novice users could be initially overwhelmed by the number of controls displayed at once. To address this concern, an extension to the CommandMap, called a StencilMap, was designed and evaluated. By using a stencil overlay to de-emphasise more advanced controls, the StencilMap directs users' visual search to a subset of controls they are most likely to need. Then, when novice users progress to the full interface, they can utilise their existing knowledge of command locations. An initial study shows that stencils are more effective at guiding visual search than ephemeral adaptation, another subset emphasis technique; however, users' spatial learning decreases as the amount of guidance increases. A second study compared StencilMaps to a palette-based subset interface, which displays the most likely commands in a ready-to-hand tool panel. Results show that StencilMaps enable stronger learning of the full UI compared to the palette approach. Addressing goal (3), this thesis presents an investigation of how interfaces can be adapted to changing interface constraints while still supporting the user's memory for item locations. A human factors study on spatially consistent transformations was conducted, with results showing that people's spatial memory is only minimally disrupted by geometric transformations (such as scaling, translation, or perspective distortion), as long as the set of items in a display is transformed as a whole. This idea is then applied to a file browser layout: by scaling the item grid when the parent window is resized, rather than reflowing items, memory for item locations can be maintained. A second study validates this idea, showing that a scaling interface outperforms both reflow and scrolling-based techniques for revisitation when windows are resized. In summary, the contributions of this thesis are: (1) an in-depth literature review of spatial memory in psychology and HCI, which is intended to inform designers and future researchers as well as the material in this thesis; (2) the design, implementation and evaluation of a new interface, the CommandMap, which shows that spatial stability and hierarchy flattening enable a high ceiling of expert performance; (3) the design of a stencil overlay technique to help novice users find commands, and an evaluation highlighting the key trade-off between helping users and allowing them to learn; and (4) empirical evidence showing that most types of whole-interface transformations have a small effect on spatial memory, and that correspondingly, scaling interfaces outperform reflowing interfaces under changing window constraints.

This dissertation proposes a principle of "economy of command", arguing that it provides a simple and natural explanation for some well-known properties of human language syntax. The focus is on the abstract combinatorial system that constructs the hierarchical structure of linguistic expressions, with long-distance dependencies determined by the structural relation of c-command. Adopting the assumption of much recent work that properties of syntax reflect very general organizational principles, I propose that syntactic forms with fewer and shorter c-command relations are preferred. Within the boundaries of strict binary branching assumed here, this results in a preference for hierarchical tree structures to be shallow and bushy, rather than deep and narrow. I pursue two broad applications of this principle, to syntactic movement and phrase structure. I argue that movement, the displacement of material to thematically unrelated positions, is a mechanism to reduce the number and length of c-command relations in the affected structures. I detail the properties we expect if movement is driven by this principle, including antilocality, a size threshold effect, a class of island effects, and feedback effects on iterated patterns of movement. I argue that these predictions align well with recent empirical descriptions of syntactic movement. I develop an account in these terms of the cross-linguistic ordering of elements within nominal phrases. Utilizing a computer program, I show that a single underlying structure common to all languages can give rise to all and only the attested word order possibilities via c-command-reducing movements, and describe the required shape of this underlying structure. The principle of economy of command also makes predictions about the format of phrase structure. Among the possible ways to build self-similar syntactic structure, the phrasal forms that build trees with the fewest c-command relations are "endocentric", in the geometric sense that each phrase contains a unique local terminal, and every daughter of the phrase that does not contain its associated terminal is another phrase. This provides a structural basis for the mysterious headedness of phrases. These successes support the validity of the principle, and reinforce the broader project of seeking naturalistic explanation of linguistic properties.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / Flight Termination is a control action that takes place when missiles or targets violate estabished safety criteria. The flight termination receiver, part of a ground to air control loop, is characterised by high system integrity and dedication to recovering and decoding the command signals. The paper describes the factors that have influenced the design and build of a robust Pulse Code Modulation Flight Termination Receiver for use on UK Trial Ranges. This work has been carried out with the support of UK MoD(PE), A ARM 51, on contract number A ARM 13b/224.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / A comprehensive examination of the market demands for cost reduced satellite telemetry & control stations will be presented. These systems are implemented using flexible, open architecture-based high performance real-time systems. The trend for combining telemetry monitoring of satellite data with closed-loop satellite command and control functions will be presented. This combined functionality opens up the possibilities for completely integrated, reduced cost satellite control systems. The market forces driving the demand for this integrated functionality include the broadening of non-military satellite applications, the widening international deployment of commercial satellites and the accompanying drive toward decentralized satellite control. The major requirements for the telemetry processing and command & control functionality of the integrated, reduced cost satellite control system will be presented. These requirements include: full real-time performance for processing telemetry data; flexible architecture for the incorporation of a wide range of I/O devices; capability of performing real-time, closed-loop control based on conditions in the telemetry data; user friendly development environments for application-specific customization of the system; and low system costs with the capability of indigenous support. The divergent requirements of performance, flexibility and price of these integrated, reduced cost satellite control systems is made possible via the use of open architecture building blocks that include standard VME boards combined with specialized real-time software drivers and user oriented, flexible Graphical User Interface (GUI) software.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1993 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Recommendations of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) provide a standard approach for implementing spacecraft packet telemetry and command interfaces. The Fast Auroral Snapshot (FAST) Small Explorer mission relies heavily on the CCSDS virtual channel and packetization concepts to achieve near real-time commanding and distribution of telemetry between separate space borne science and spacecraft processors and multiple ground stations. Use of the CCSDS recommendations allows the FAST mission to realize significant re-use of ground systems developed for the first Small Explorer mission, and also simplifies system interfaces and interactions between flight software developers, spacecraft integrators, and ground system operators.