The aerospace environment is a dynamic interaction between man, machine and the environment. Skin diseases are not particularly significant aeromedically, yet they could permanently affect an aviator's status for continued flying duty. A number of dermatological conditions lend themselves to flying restrictions for the aviator. Aircrew and ground crew are exposed to a myriad of elements that co...

Since the rapid flybys of Mariner 10 in the late seventies, Mercury is known to have an intrinsic magnetic field that dominates the interactions of Mercury with its space environment. Even though important aspects of this interaction have been probed by the Mariner 10 instruments, crucial aspects remain unknown and unexplored. In particular there are fundamental uncertainties concerning the ion...

An E cient Tuple Space Programming Environment Introduction Tuple Space Programming Fundamentals Example Linda Program Associative Memory Analysis Compilation Environment Basic Translation Optimizing Compilers Run time Environment Processor Location of Data Data Structures for E cient Data Access Data Transfer Protocol Process Creation Cluster Execution Environment Run time Optimizations Extens...

This paper describes a terrain-aided navigation system that employs points of maximum curvature extracted from laser scan data as primary landmarks. A scale space method is used to extract points of maximum curvature from laser range scans of unmodified outdoor environments. This information is then fused with odometric information to provide localization information for an outdoor vehicle. The...

In 1687, Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) produced his famous and important work Principia , based on the experiments and analyses of Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642). In this work he proposed three main laws. The fi rst was the law of inertia . He used the term inertia for the property of matter that causes it to resist a change in its state of motion. Inertia of an object must be overcome to set it in...

Many sophisticated formalisms exist for specifying complex system behaviors, but methods for specifying performance and dependability variables have remained quite primitive. To cope with this problem, modelers often must augment system models with extra state information and event types to support particular variables. This often leads to models that are non-intuitive, and must be changed to s...

We consider a new class of planning problems involving a set of non-negative real variables, and a set of non-deterministic actions that increase or decrease the values of these variables by some arbitrary amount. The formulas specifying the initial state, goal state, or action preconditions can only assert whether certain variables are equal to zero or not. Assuming that the state of the varia...