The biogeographical coverage of the Lao PDR protected area system is amongst the most comprehensive in the world. This, coupled with the government’s progressive policy of participatory management, is a notable achievement for one of the world’s ‘Least Developed Countries’ and a foundation of great promise for biodiversity conservation and national development in the country. The challenge now ...

from Lamet, Hill Peasant in French Indochina

Infrastructureless positioning systems such as pedestrian dead reckoning suffer from error accumulation. This paper describes the application of a technique using self-deployed localization tokens and simultaneous localization and mapping to overcome this limitation. We successfully applied the technique known from mobile robotics to pedestrian self-localization based on pedestrian dead reckoni...

This article illuminates the transmedia storytelling techniques in The Walking Dead comic book and video game. Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead localizes itself within the comic book world of The Walking Dead by acting as a transmedia storytelling device and using intertextuality comics to assist game players with meaning-making. By participating in the game, Telltale rewards players with addit...

This paper describes two methods aimed at improving dead-reckoning accuracy with fiber optic gyroscopes (FOGs) in mobile robots. The first method is a precision calibration procedure for FOGs, which effectively reduces the ill-effects of non-linearity of the scale-factor and temperature dependency. The second method is the implementation of an indirect feedback Kalman filter that fuses the sens...

Dead reckoning is an on-line form of spatial navigation used by an animal to identify its present location and return directly to a starting location, even after circuitous outward trips. At present, it is not known which of several self-movement cues (efferent copy from movement commands, proprioceptive information, sensory flow, or vestibular information) are used to compute homeward trajecto...

We present a novel approach to enable dead reckoning in a scenario with unconstrained placement of a device in the user’s trouser pockets. Utilizing the rotation of the device due to body motion, we estimate the user’s walking direction robustly to different placements in the pocket and without additional body-worn sensors.

This paper presents results from the experimental evaluation of a state-of-the-art fiber-optics gyroscope. The purpose of our experiments was to evaluate the suitability of this gyroscope for enhancing dead-reckoning in mobile robots. The evaluated gyroscope was the “Autogyro Navigator” made by Andrews. For a 4×4 m square path the dead-reckoning error when using this gyro was less than ±1.2° in...