IMPORTANCE OF TRACK DESIGN IN GROUND TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS.

The development of the tracks for the Tracked Hovercraft and Bliss Pendair Systems is described. Comment is made on the relative importance of track and suspension costs and of the need for tracks that are weather, vandal and noise proof. It is argued that the beam section required for a suspended air cushion is more likely to fit these requirements than that for beam riding vehicles, either air-cushion or magnetically suspended.

Data structures and software tools for the computer aided design of control systems: a survey.

CAD software can be structured as a set of modular 'software tools' only if there is some agreement on the data structures which are to be passed between tools. Beyond this basic requirement, it is desirable to give the agreed structures the status of 'data types' in the language used for interactive design. The ultimate refinement is to have a data management capability which 'understands' how to manipulate such data types. In this paper the requirements of CACSD are formulated from the point of view of Database Management Systems. Progress towards meeting these requirements in both the DBMS and the CACSD community is reviewed. The conclusion reached is that there has been considerable movement towards the realisation of software tools for CACSD, but that this owes more to modern ideas about programming languages, than to DBMS developments. The DBMS field has identified some useful concepts, but further significant progress is expected to come from the exploitation of concepts such as object-oriented programming, logic programming, or functional programming.

Fault tolerant flight control - A survey

Nowadays, control systems are involved in nearly all aspects of our lives. They are all around us, but their presence is not always really apparent. They are in our kitchens, in our DVD-players, computers and our cars. They are found in elevators, ships, aircraft and spacecraft. Control systems are present in every industry, they are used to control chemical reactors, distillation columns, and nuclear power plants. They are constantly and inexhaustibly working, making our life more comfortable and more efficient...until the system fails. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Deliberation in the motor system: reflex gains track evolving evidence leading to a decision.

Both decision making and sensorimotor control require real-time processing of noisy information streams. Historically these processes were thought to operate sequentially: cognitive processing leads to a decision, and the outcome is passed to the motor system to be converted into action. Recently, it has been suggested that the decision process may provide a continuous flow of information to the motor system, allowing it to prepare in a graded fashion for the probable outcome. Such continuous flow is supported by electrophysiology in nonhuman primates. Here we provide direct evidence for the continuous flow of an evolving decision variable to the motor system in humans. Subjects viewed a dynamic random dot display and were asked to indicate their decision about direction by moving a handle to one of two targets. We probed the state of the motor system by perturbing the arm at random times during decision formation. Reflex gains were modulated by the strength and duration of motion, reflecting the accumulated evidence in support of the evolving decision. The magnitude and variance of these gains tracked a decision variable that explained the subject's decision accuracy. The findings support a continuous process linking the evolving computations associated with decision making and sensorimotor control.