We describe our entry in the AAAI 2002 Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) competition, a marsupial team consisting of a larger wheeled robot and several small legged robots, carried around by the larger robot. This setup exploits complimentary strengths of each robot type in a challenging domain. We describe both the hardware and software architecture, and the on-board real-time mapping which forms...

An important problem in creating efficient public transport systems is obtaining data about the set of trips that passengers make, usually referred to as an Origin/Destination (OD) matrix. Obtaining this data is problematic and expensive in general, especially in the case of buses because on-board ticketing systems do not record where and when passengers get off a bus. In this paper we describe...

This paper describes a fielded AI system in daily use at the European Space Agency (ESA-ESOC) since February 2005. The tool, named MEXAR2, provides continuous support to human mission planners in synthesizing plans for downlinking on-board memory data from the MARS EXPRESS spacecraft to Earth. The introduction of the tool in the mission planning workflow significantly decreased the time spent i...

Modern products frequently feature monitors designed to detect actual or impending malfunctions. False alarms (Type I errors) or excessive delays in detecting real malfunctions (Type II errors) can seriously reduce monitor utility. Sound engineering practice includes physical evaluation of error rates. Type II error rates are relatively easy to evaluate empirically. However, adequate evaluation...

Generational theory has much to offer the home economics profession. This article explains sociocultural generational theory, traces the evolution of home economics informed by generational theory, and considers the implications of generational theory as a mechanism to “future proof” the home economics profession. In particular, insights into the unique traits, strengths, and abilities for the ...

Robust execution of exploration mission plans has to deal with limited computational power on-board a planetary rover, and with limited rover’s autonomy. In most cases, these limitations practically prevent the rover to synthesize a new mission plan when some unexpected contingency arises. The paper shows that when such deviations refers to anomalies on the consumption of resources, robust exec...

The BOSS project [1] aims at developing an innovative and bandwidth efficient communication system to transmit large data rate communications between public transport vehicles and the wayside to answer to the increasing need from Public Transport operators for new and/or enhanced on-board functionality and services, such as passenger security and exploitation such as remote diagnostic or predic...

What drives export quality? Using firm-level data from Portugal on exports by product and destination market, we find that free-on-board unit values increase systematically with distance, and tend to be higher in shipments to richer nations. These relationships reflect not only the selection of firms across markets, but also the within-firm selection of product varieties across destinations. Fu...

The uncertainties in the outgassing/offgassing, dust/debris, and radiation environments within and surrounding spacecraft regularly lead to operational problems with technical, scientific and ultimately economically deleterious consequences. In this paper we present the outputs of a study into a small modular spacecraft health and environmental monitoring package deployed in a standard 3U CubeS...

This paper introduces an architecture for aggregation of output from different diagnostic tools. The diagnostic fusion tool deals with conflict resolution where diagnostic tools disagree, temporal information discord where the estimate of different tools is separated in time, differences in information updates where the classifiers are updated at different rates, fault coverage discrepancies, a...