International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper will discuss the use of a specialized telemetry signal simulator for pre-mission verification of a telemetry receiving system. This will include how to configure tests that will determine system performance under “real time” conditions such as multipath fading and Doppler shifting. The paper will analyze a telemetry receiving system and define tests for each part of the system. This will include tests for verification of the antenna system. Also included, will be tests for verification of the receiver/combiner system. The paper will further discuss how adding PCM simulation capabilities to the signal simulator will allow testing of frame synchronizers and decomutation equipment.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / A series of RF channel flight characterization tests were recently run to benchmark multi-path performance of high-speed quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) over the ocean surface. The modulation format was differential-phase/absolute-amplitude two level polar 16 QAM. The bit rate was 100 Megabits per second with a symbol period of 40nS. An aircraft radiated the test signal at 5 different altitudes. It made two inward flights, on two different days, at each altitude with vertical and horizontal polarization, respectively. Receivers, using circular antenna polarization, were in two different locations. Analysis of the resulting data shows flat fading and frequency selective fading effects.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Transmitter mobility and multipath propagation make the telemetry channel both time and frequency selective, which results in telemetry link errors, sometimes in crucial flight phases. Only part of these impairments are compensated by various diversity techniques, but a fast converging adaptive channel equalization is probably the best suited and most cost effective solution. This paper first presents an analysis of mobile multipath propagation in telemetry based on recorded operational signals, both at the transmitter and at the receiver sides. Then it provides performance evaluation of a novel blind equalizer, assessed by offline processing of the recorded signals. The paper focuses on typical environments at a flight test centre, which exhibit critical multipath channel characteristics, namely during parking, taxiway and flight. The channel analysis exploits the recorded signals as well as the time frequency response of the novel equalizer filter. Performance evaluation shows that the equalizer outperforms state of the art Constant Modulus Algorithm (CMA). In particular, it is shown to significantly increase the telemetry link availability even in severe conditions, sometimes from nearly 0% to almost 100%, whereas the CMA fails to improve the signal quality as soon as the channel varies in time.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / In geometrically complex indoor industrial environments, such as factories, health care facilities, or offices, it can be challenging to determine where each telemetry receiver needs to be located to collect data from one or more mobile transmitters. Accurately estimating the areas that each transmitter frequently travels, rarely travels, and quickly travels through, helps to simplify the telemetry system planning problem and establishes which areas may be acceptable to provide marginal coverage. This paper discusses how using A* (A-Star) for transmitter path planning can assist in the telemetry system planning problem.

In this thesis, we study robust combinatorial problems with interval data. We introduce several new measures of robustness in response to the drawbacks of existing measures of robustness. The idea of these new measures is to ensure that the solutions are satisfactory for the decision maker in all scenarios, including the worst case scenario. Therefore, we have introduced a threshold over the worst case costs, in which above this threshold, solutions are no longer satisfactory for the decision maker. It is, however, important to consider other criteria than just the worst case. Therefore, in each of these new measures, a second criteria is used to evaluate the performance of the solution in other scenarios such as the best case one. We also study the robust deviation p-elements problem. In fact, we study when this solution is equal to the optimal solution in the scenario where the cost of each element is the midpoint of its corresponding interval. Then, we finally formulate the robust combinatorial problem with interval data as a bicriteria problem. We also integrate the decision maker's preferences over certain types of solutions into the model. We propose a method that uses these preferences to find the set of solutions that are never preferred by any other solution. We call this set the final set. We study the properties of the final sets from a coherence point of view and from a robust point of view. From a coherence point of view, we study necessary and sufficient conditions for the final set to be monotonic, for the corresponding preferences to be without cycles, and for the set to be stable. Those that do not satisfy these properties are eliminated since we believe these properties to be essential. We also study other properties such as the transitivity of the preference and indifference relations and more. We note that many of our final sets are included in one another and some are even intersections of other final sets. From a robust point of view, we compare our final sets with different measures of robustness and with the first- and second-degree stochastic dominance. We show which sets contain all of these solutions and which only contain these types of solutions. Therefore, when the decision maker chooses his preferences to find the final set, he knows what types of solutions may or may not be in the set. Lastly, we implement this method and apply it to the Robust Shortest Path Problem. We look at how this method performs using different types of randomly generated instances.

Many mobility impaired users are unable to operate a powered wheelchair safely, without causing harm to themselves, others, and the environment. Smart wheelchairs that assist or replace user control have been developed to cater for these users, utilising systems and algorithms from autonomous robots. Despite a sustained period of research and development of robotic wheelchairs, there are very few available commercially. This thesis describes work towards developing a navigation system that is aimed at being retro-fitted to powered wheelchairs. The navigation system developed takes a systems engineering approach, integrating many existing open-source software projects to deliver a system that would otherwise not be possible in the time frame of a master's thesis. The navigation system introduced in this thesis is aimed at operating in an unstructured indoor environment, and requires no a priori information about the environment. The key components in the system are: obstacle avoidance, map building, localisation, path planning, and autonomously travelling towards a goal. The test electric wheelchair was instrumented with the following: a laptop, a laser scanner, wheel encoders, camera, and a variety of user input methods. The user interfaces that have been implemented and tested include a touch screen friendly graphical user interface, keyboard and joystick.

In 1985, Moffat-Takaoka (MT) algorithm was developed to solve the all pairs shortest path (APSP) problem. This algorithm manages to get time complexity of O(n² log n) expected time when the end-point independent model of probabilistic assumption is used. However, the use of a critical point introduced in this algorithm has made the implementation of this algorithm quite complicated and the running time of this algorithm is difficult to analyze. Therefore, this study introduces a new deterministic algorithm for the APSP that provides an alternative to the existing MT algorithm. The major advantages of this approach compared to the MT algorithm are its simplicity, intuitive appeal and ease of analysis. Moreover, the algorithm was shown to be efficient as the expected running time is the same O(n² log n). Performance of a good algorithm depends on the data structure used to speed up the operations needed by the algorithm such as insert, delete-min and decrease-key operations. In this study, two new data structures have been implemented, namely quaternary and dimensional heaps. In the experiment carried out, the quaternary heap that employed similar concept with the trinomial heap with a special insertion cache function performed better than the trinomial heap when the number of n vertices was small. Likewise, the dimensional heap data structure executed the decrease-key operation efficiently by maintaining the thinnest structure possible through the use of thin and thick edges, far surpassing the existing binary, Fibonacci and 2-3 heaps data structures when a special acyclic graph was used. Taken together all these promising findings, a new improved algorithm running on a good data structure can be implemented to enhance the computing accuracy and speed of todays computing machines.

No description available.

This thesis explores the role of path integration on the firing of hippocampal place cells and medial entorhinal grid cells. Grid cells fire at equidistant locations in an environment, indicating that they keep track of the distance and direction an animal has moved in an environment. One class of model of path integration uses a continuous attractor network to update position information. The first part of this thesis showed that such a network can generate a "look-ahead" of neural activity that sweeps through the positions just visited and about to be visited, on the short time scale that is observed<italic>in vivo</italic>. Adding intrinsic currents to the neurons in the network model allowed this look-ahead to recur every theta cycle, and generate grid fields of a size comparable to data. Grid cells are a major input the hippocampus, and are hypothesized to be the source of the place specificity of place cells. When an animal explores an open environment, place cells are active in a particular location regardless of the direction in which the animal travels through it. While performing a specific task, such as visiting specific locations in the environment in sequence, however, most place cells are active only in one direction. The second part of this thesis studied the development of this directionality. It was determined that upon the initial appearance of place fields in a novel environment, place cells fired in all directions, supporting the hypothesis that the path integration is the primary determinant of place specificity. The directionality of place fields developed gradually, possibly as a result of learning. Ideas about how this directionality could develop are explored.

Diagnostic tests are designed to detect and isolate faults in sequential systems. The problem is to evaluate the effectiveness of the design. For stuck faults a diagnostic model can be used. A fault simulation strategy is presented for generating this model. First, definitions, for identifying critical inputs are derived. A definition is a statement of the conditions to sensitize an input. Then a fault free simulation is used to generate a critical value array. A critical path is traced through the sensitized inputs marked in the array using a critical value array tracing algorithm that is developed. This algorithm traces a path back in time, as required for a sequential system, to identify detectable faults for the model.