Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Planning algorithms are impacting technical disciplines and industries around the world, including robotics, computer-aided design, manufacturing, computer graphics, aerospace applications, drug design, and protein folding. This coherent and comprehensive book unifies material from several sources, including robotics, control theory, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. The treatment is centered on robot motion planning but integrates material on planning in discrete spaces. A major part of the book is devoted to planning under uncertainty, including decision theory, Markov decision processes, and information spaces, which are the “configuration spaces” of all sensor-based planning problems. The last part of the book delves into planning under differential constraints that arise when automating the motions of virtually any mechanical system. Developed from courses taught by the author, the book is intended for students, engineers, and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory as well as computer graphics, algorithms, and computational biology.

Planning Algorithms: Introductory Material

Humans perceive the three-dimensional structure of the world with apparent ease. However, despite all of the recent advances in computer vision research, the dream of having a computer interpret an image at the same level as a two-year old remains elusive. Why is computer vision such a challenging problem and what is the current state of the art? Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications explores the variety of techniques commonly used to analyze and interpret images. It also describes challenging real-world applications where vision is being successfully used, both for specialized applications such as medical imaging, and for fun, consumer-level tasks such as image editing and stitching, which students can apply to their own personal photos and videos. More than just a source of recipes, this exceptionally authoritative and comprehensive textbook/reference also takes a scientific approach to basic vision problems, formulating physical models of the imaging process before inverting them to produce descriptions of a scene. These problems are also analyzed using statistical models and solved using rigorous engineering techniques Topics and features: structured to support active curricula and project-oriented courses, with tips in the Introduction for using the book in a variety of customized courses; presents exercises at the end of each chapter with a heavy emphasis on testing algorithms and containing numerous suggestions for small mid-term projects; provides additional material and more detailed mathematical topics in the Appendices, which cover linear algebra, numerical techniques, and Bayesian estimation theory; suggests additional reading at the end of each chapter, including the latest research in each sub-field, in addition to a full Bibliography at the end of the book; supplies supplementary course material for students at the associated website, http://szeliski.org/Book/. Suitable for an upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level course in computer science or engineering, this textbook focuses on basic techniques that work under real-world conditions and encourages students to push their creative boundaries. Its design and exposition also make it eminently suitable as a unique reference to the fundamental techniques and current research literature in computer vision.

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Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications

We present a real-time algorithm which can recover the 3D trajectory of a monocular camera, moving rapidly through a previously unknown scene. Our system, which we dub MonoSLAM, is the first successful application of the SLAM methodology from mobile robotics to the "pure vision" domain of a single uncontrolled camera, achieving real time but drift-free performance inaccessible to structure from motion approaches. The core of the approach is the online creation of a sparse but persistent map of natural landmarks within a probabilistic framework. Our key novel contributions include an active approach to mapping and measurement, the use of a general motion model for smooth camera movement, and solutions for monocular feature initialization and feature orientation estimation. Together, these add up to an extremely efficient and robust algorithm which runs at 30 Hz with standard PC and camera hardware. This work extends the range of robotic systems in which SLAM can be usefully applied, but also opens up new areas. We present applications of MonoSLAM to real-time 3D localization and mapping for a high-performance full-size humanoid robot and live augmented reality with a hand-held camera

/pdf/monoslam-real-time-single-camera-slam-ydmj8dc1vj.pdf

MonoSLAM: Real-Time Single Camera SLAM

This paper describes the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem and the essential methods for solving the SLAM problem and summarizes key implementations and demonstrations of the method. While there are still many practical issues to overcome, especially in more complex outdoor environments, the general SLAM method is now a well understood and established part of robotics. Another part of the tutorial summarized more recent works in addressing some of the remaining issues in SLAM, including computation, feature representation, and data association

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Simultaneous localization and mapping: part I

This research addresses the significant challenge of thermal regulation for lunar polar micro-rovers. These are distinct from priors by way of very small size, mass, and power, but particularly for the extremes of ambient environment in which they must operate. On the lunar poles, rovers experience temperatures ranging from $-240^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$ to $30^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$. The internal elec-tronics essential to these rovers, however, ideally operate in the narrow range from $0^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$ to $40^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$. Since there is no atmosphere on the Moon, the mechanism of atmospheric convection that dominates on Earth does not apply, and only solutions that rely on the weaker mechanisms of radiation and conduction pertain. Small rovers lack the thermal inertia and mass budgets that enable traditional thermal solutions that pertain to their larger counterparts. Early micro-rover missions last a single lunar illumination period and end at sundown. For that reason night survival is beyond scope and incorporation of isotope heating is not incorporated into this research. MoonRanger is embraced as an exemplar for designing, ana-lyzing and illustrating the principles and solutions for the new class of lunar polar micro-rovers. MoonRanger is the world's first lunar polar micro-rover destined for the lunar south pole to measure ice. The research distinguished critical insights. 1) There is a need for significant heat rejection due to the combination of sun impingement and the significant electrical power on order of 65 watts that manifests as heat within the rover. 2) Aggregating all sensitive avionics and batteries in a monolithic enclosure provides multiple advantages of thermal inertia and conductive pathway to remove excess heat out to cold space via the radiator. 3) The enclosure's sides are lined with Multi-Layer Insulation to mitigate radiative heat transfer with cold lunar regolith. 4) Due to terrain irregularities the rover's radiator deck can tilt into the sun causing unwanted heating. To prevent this, the solar panel is integrated with the chassis so that it casts a shadow on the radiator to reduce sunlight incidence. 5) The solar panel also features high-emissivity films that increase heat rejection, thus decreasing temperature and increasing cell efficiency. 6) Poly-mer insulators protect the thermally sensitive actuators from the extremely cold wheels that they drive. This paper demonstrates how MoonRanger employs these considerations to display ro-bust thermal regulation keeping most avionic components to temperatures between $0^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$ and $40^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$ at surface temperatures ranging from $-215^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$ to $30^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$. The research establishes baseline considerations for future solar powered polar micro-rovers and serves as an archetype for this class of rovers that are yet to come.

Thermal Management Considerations For Lunar Polar Micro-Rovers

Hundreds of pits on the Moon and Mars expose unique unweathered geology on their walls, and some may access habitable caves. Small, autonomous rovers could explore, image, and map planetary pits from the rim, capturing close-range, low-angle, long-exposure imagery that cannot be captured from orbit. The small but high fidelity models must be processed in-situ for the short-duration small missions of our time with limited bandwidth since the raw imagery required for modeling is at least an order of magnitude greater than what can be downloaded in a lunar day. The vast raw imagery is the basis for modeling pits with the accuracy, resolution and lighting corrections necessary for morphology study and search for cavernous openings. This work develops and evaluates several component technologies for these explorations. A safe-approach behavior is developed and employed to navigate pit rims to vantages for acquiring images. Images from multiple vantages are fed to a specialized incremental pit modeling pipeline that computes the high-resolution 3D pit models. The technologies are manifested aboard a prototype micro rover and demonstrated at a terrestrial pit having size and shape comparable to known planetary pits. In multiple end-to-end mission simulations, these techniques are shown to reliably produce unprecedented, accurate, high-coverage pit models.

Experimental Results of Autonomous Microrover Exploration and Mapping of an Analog Planetary Pit

Background Extended access services were introduced to help stop declining patient satisfaction with access to general practice. There has been no evaluation, at a practice population level, as to how the introduction of these services has impacted patients. Aim To explore the association between practices offering extended access and patient responses to the GP Patient Survey (GPPS). Design & setting An observational study was carried out. Patient experience data were taken from the national GPPS in England (2018 and 2019). Data on the provision of extended access services were sourced from NHS England. The analyses considered potential confounding factors. These were sourced from publicly available data about practice characteristics from NHS Digital, NHS England, and government websites. Method The percentage of patients reporting positive responses to questions related to satisfaction with access, continuity of care, and overall satisfaction were modelled. The association between these outcomes and the provision of extended access were estimated via multivariable fixed-effects linear regression. Results There were no associations between practices offering extended access services and key indicators of patient experience or satisfaction at a practice population level. Conclusion Extended access has a cost of an estimated 250 million GBP per year. While there is a body of work that finds associations with emergency department use reduction, at a practice population level, in this study it has been found that extended access had no measurable impact. This may be because extended access services are only used by a small number of patients, and its introduction has not significantly impacted general practices and most general practice patients.

https://bjgpopen.org/content/bjgpoa/early/2022/05/17/BJGPO.2022.0013.full.pdf

Exploring the impact of the national extended access scheme on patient experience of and satisfaction with general practice: an observational study using the English GP Patient Survey

In 2011 the UK government announced future plans to use subjective wellbeing as a measure of economic success. Understanding both the individual and geographic determinants of subjective wellbeing is important for future policy makers. Internal migration has important impacts on the geographic composition of populations, and if found to impact on individual wellbeing; could have significant effects on geographical variations in wellbeing. The effect of internal migration on individuals has largely been focussed in the labour literature, assessing employment and earnings changes with migration. This paper assesses the effects of internal migration on subjective wellbeing in Great Britain. We use nationally representative data from the eighteen waves (1991-2008) of the British Household Panel Survey. The panel structure of the data is ideal for migration analysis, and the data contains a wide range of personal, labour market, and health characteristics of respondents. Migration is measured by residential moves. Wellbeing is measured using the 12-point version of the General Health Questionnaire. The effects of migration on the GHQ score are measured in the year following a move and by previous moving preference. The methodology controls for the potential endogeneity of the migration decision and potential correlation between unobserved heterogeneity and the covariates. The results suggest the effects of migration differ by preference to move the previous period. Internal migration could have important impacts on geographic inequalities in wellbeing.

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William Whittaker

Papers

Thermal Management Considerations For Lunar Polar Micro-Rovers

Experimental Results of Autonomous Microrover Exploration and Mapping of an Analog Planetary Pit

Exploring the impact of the national extended access scheme on patient experience of and satisfaction with general practice: an observational study using the English GP Patient Survey

The pursuit of happiness? Subjective wellbeing and internal migration in Great Britain

Procédé, appareil et système de navigation et de positionnement intégrés pour véhicules et de positionnement