The role and future challenges of wireless communication networks for cooperative autonomous city vehicles

This paper elaborates on the use of future wireless communication networks for autonomous city vehicles. After addressing the state of technology, the paper explains the autonomous vehicle control system architecture and the Cybercars-2 communication framework; it presents experimental tests of communication-based real-time decision making; and discusses potential applications for communication in order to improve the localization and perception abilities of autonomous vehicles in urban environments.

Improving safety for driverless city vehicles : real-time communication and decision making

This paper elaborates on the Cybercars-2 Wireless Communication Framework for driverless city vehicles, which is used for Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communication. The developed framework improves the safety and efficiency of driverless city vehicles. Furthermore, this paper also elaborates on the vehicle control software architecture. On-road tests of both the communication framework and its application for real-time decision making show that the communication framework is reliable and useful for improving the safe operation of driverless city vehicles.

An object-oriented design of a World Model for autonomous city vehicles

This paper presents an object-oriented world model for the road traffic environment of autonomous (driver-less) city vehicles. The developed World Model is a software component of the autonomous vehicle's control system, which represents the vehicle's view of its road environment. Regardless whether the information is a priori known, obtained through on-board sensors, or through communication, the World Model stores and updates information in real-time, notifies the decision making subsystem about relevant events, and provides access to its stored information. The design is based on software design patterns, and its application programming interface provides both asynchronous and synchronous access to its information. Experimental results of both a 3D simulation and real-world experiments show that the approach is applicable and real-time capable.

An arteriovenous loop in a protected space generates a permanent, highly vascular, tissue-engineered construct

A major obstacle to 3-dimensional tissue engineering is incorporation of a functional vascular supply to support the expanding new tissue. This is overcome in an in vivo intrinsic vascularization model where an arteriovenous loop (AVL) is placed in a noncollapsible space protected by a polycarbonate chamber. Vascular development and hypoxia were examined from 3 days to 112 days by vascular casting, morphometric, and morphological techniques to understand the model's vascular growth and remodeling parameters for tissue engineering purposes. At 3 days a fibrin exudate surrounded the AVL, providing a scaffold to migrating inflammatory, endothelial, and mesenchymal cells. Capillaries formed between 3 and 7 days. Hypoxia and cell proliferation were maximal at 7 days, followed by a peak in percent vascular volume at 10 days (23.20±3.14% compared with 3.59±2.68% at 3 days, P<0.001). Maximal apoptosis was observed at 112 days. The protected space and spontaneous microcirculatory development in this model suggest it would be applicable for in vivo tissue engineering. A temporal window in a period of intense angiogenesis at 7 to 10 days is optimal for exogenous cell seeding and survival in the chamber, potentially enabling specific tissue outcomes to be achieved.

Towards increased road safety : real-time decision making for driverless city vehicles

This work elaborates on the topic of decision making for driverless city vehicles, particularly focusing on the aspects on how to develop a reliable approach which meets the requirements of safe city traffic. Decision making in this context refers to the problem of identifying the most appropriate driving maneuver to be performed in a given traffic situation. The overall decision making problem is decomposed into two consecutive stages. The first stage is safety-crucial, representing the decision regarding the set of feasible driving maneuvers. The second stage represents the decision regarding the most appropriate driving maneuver from the set of feasible ones. The developed decision making approach has been implemented in C++ and initially tested in a 3D simulation environment and, thereafter, in real-world experiments. The real-world experiments also included the integration of wireless communication between vehicles.

Spontaneous large volume adipose tissue generation from a vascularized pedicled fat flap inside a chamber space

A novel method of spontaneous generation of new adipose tissue from an existing fat flap is described. A defined volume of fat flap based on the superficial inferior epigastric vascular pedicle in the rat was elevated and inset into a hollow plastic chamber implanted subcutaneously in the groin of the rat. The chamber walls were either perforated or solid and the chambers either contained poly(D,L-lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) sponge matrix or not. The contents were analyzed after being in situ for 6 weeks. The total volume of the flap tissue in all groups except the control groups, where the flap was not inserted into the chambers, increased significantly, especially in the perforated chambers (0.08 ± 0.007 mL baseline compared to 1.2 ± 0.08 mL in the intact ones). Volume analysis of individual component tissues within the flaps revealed that the adipocyte volume increased and was at a maximum in the chambers without PLGA, where it expanded from 0.04 ± 0.003 mL at insertion to 0.5 ± 0.08 mL (1250% increase) in the perforated chambers and to 0.16 ± 0.03 mL (400% increase) in the intact chambers. Addition of PLGA scaffolds resulted in less fat growth. Histomorphometric analysis rather than simple hypertrophy documented an increased number of adipocytes. The new tissue was highly vascularized and no fat necrosis or atypical changes were observed.

The impact of a congestion charging exemption on the demand for new low‐emission vehicles

Numerous initiatives have been employed around the world in order to address rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions originating from the transport sector. These measures include: travel demand management (congestion‐charging), increased fuel taxes, alternative fuel subsidies and low‐emission vehicle (LEV) rebates. Incentivizing the purchase of LEVs has been one of the more prevalent approaches in attempting to tackle this global issue. LEVs, whilst having the advantage of lower emissions and, in some cases, more efficient fuel consumption, also bring the downsides of increased purchase cost, reduced convenience of vehicle fuelling, and operational uncertainty. To stimulate demand in the face of these challenges, various incentive‐based policies, such as toll exemptions, have been used by national and local governments to encourage the purchase of these types of vehicles. In order to address rising GHG emissions in Stockholm, and in line with the Swedish Government’s ambition to operate a fossil free fleet by 2030, a number of policies were implemented targeting the transport sector. Foremost amongst these was the combination of a congestion charge – initiated to discourage emissions‐intensive travel – and an exemption from this charge for some LEVs, established to encourage a transition towards a ‘green’ vehicle fleet. Although both policies shared the aim of reducing GHG emissions, the exemption for LEVs carried the risk of diminishing the effectiveness of the congestion charging scheme. As the number of vehicle owners choosing to transition to an eligible LEV increased, the congestion‐reduction effectiveness of the charging scheme weakened. In fact, policy makers quickly recognized this potential issue and consequently phased out the LEV exemption less than 18 months after its introduction (1). Several studies have investigated the demand for LEVs through stated‐preference (SP) surveys across multiple countries, including: Denmark (2), Germany (3, 4), UK (5), Canada (6), USA (7, 8) and Australia (9). Although each of these studies differed in approach, all involved SP surveys where differing characteristics between various types of vehicles, including LEVs, were presented to respondents and these respondents in turn made hypothetical decisions about which vehicle they would be most likely to purchase. Although these studies revealed a number of interesting findings in regards to the potential demand for LEVs, they relied on SP data. In contrast, this paper employs an approach where LEV choice is modelled by taking a retrospective view and by using revealed preference (RP) data. By examining the revealed preferences of vehicle owners in Stockholm, this study overcomes one of the principal limitations of SP data, namely that stated preferences may not in fact reflect individuals’ actual choices, such as when cost, time, and inconvenience factors are real rather than hypothetical. This paper’s RP approach involves modelling the characteristics of individuals who purchased new LEVs, whilst estimating the effect of the congestion charging exemption upon choice probabilities and subsequent aggregate demand. The paper contributes to the current literature by examining the effectiveness of a toll exemption under revealed preference conditions, and by assessing the total effect of the policy based on key indicators for policy makers, including: vehicle owner home location, commuting patterns, number of children, age, gender and income. Extended Abstract Submission for Kuhmo Nectar Conference 2014 2 The two main research questions motivating this study were:  Which individuals chose to purchase a new LEV in Stockholm in 2008?; and,  How did the congestion charging exemption affect the aggregate demand for new LEVs in Stockholm in 2008? In order to answer these research questions the analysis was split into two stages. Firstly, a multinomial logit (MNL) model was used to identify which demographic characteristics were most significantly related to the purchase of an LEV over a conventional vehicle. The three most significant variables were found to be: intra‐cordon residency (positive); commuting across the cordon (positive); and distance of residence from the cordon (negative). In order to estimate the effect of the exemption policy on vehicle purchase choice, the model included variables to control for geographic differences in preferences, based on the location of the vehicle owners’ homes and workplaces in relation to the congestion‐charging cordon boundary. These variables included one indicator representing commutes across the cordon and another indicator representing intra‐cordon residency. The effect of the exemption policy on the probability of purchasing LEVs was estimated in the second stage of the analysis by focusing on the groups of vehicle owners that were most likely to have been affected by the policy i.e. those commuting across the cordon boundary (in both directions). Given the inclusion of the indicator variable representing commutes across the cordon, it is assumed that the estimated coefficient of this variable captures the effect of the exemption policy on the utility of choosing to purchase an exempt LEV for these two groups of vehicle owners. The intra‐cordon residency indicator variable also controls for differences between the two groups, based upon direction of travel across the cordon boundary. A counter‐hypothesis to this assumption is that the coefficient of the variable representing commuting across the cordon boundary instead only captures geo‐demographic differences that lead to variations in LEV ownership across the different groups of vehicle owners in relation to the cordon boundary. In order to address this counter‐hypothesis, an additional analysis was performed on data from a city with a similar geodemographic pattern to Stockholm, Gothenburg ‐ Sweden’s second largest city. The results of this analysis provided evidence to support the argument that the coefficient of the variable representing commutes across the cordon was capturing the effect of the exemption policy. Based upon this framework, the predicted vehicle type shares were calculated using the estimated coefficients of the MNL model and compared with predicted vehicle type shares from a simulated scenario where the exemption policy was inactive. This simulated scenario was constructed by setting the coefficient for the variable representing commutes across the cordon boundary to zero for all observations to remove the utility benefit of the exemption policy. Overall, the procedure of this second stage of the analysis led to results showing that the exemption had a substantial effect upon the probability of purchasing and aggregate demand for exempt LEVs in Stockholm during 2008. By making use of unique evidence of revealed preferences of LEV owners, this study identifies the common characteristics of new LEV owners and estimates the effect of Stockholm's congestion charging exemption upon the demand for new LEVs during 2008. It was found that the variables that had the greatest effect upon the choice of purchasing an exempt LEV included intra‐cordon residency (positive), distance of home from the cordon (negative), and commuting across the cordon (positive). It was also determined that owners under the age of 30 years preferred non‐exempt LEVs (low CO2 LEVs), whilst those over the age of 30 years preferred electric vehicles. In terms of electric vehicles, it was apparent that those individuals living within the city had the highest propensity towards purchasing this vehicle type. A negative relationship between choosing an electric vehicle and the distance of an individuals’ residency from the cordon was also evident. Overall, the congestion charging exemption was found to have increased the share of exempt LEVs in Stockholm by 1.9%, with, as expected, a much stronger effect on those commuting across the boundary, with those living inside the cordon having a 13.1% increase, and those owners living outside the cordon having a 5.0% increase. This increase in demand corresponded to an additional 538 (+/‐ 93; 95% C.I.) new exempt LEVs purchased in Stockholm during 2008 (out of a total of 5 427; 9.9%). Policy makers can take note that an incentive‐based policy can increase the demand for LEVs and appears to be an appropriate approach to adopt when attempting to reduce transport emissions through encouraging a transition towards a ‘green’ vehicle fleet.

Bound to the borders: Representing refugees in the Australian space

This project consists of a novel and an exegesis that explore the use of fiction to counter negative hegemonic representations of refugees in Australia. The possibilities of using Australian spaces, including border spaces, to reveal tensions surrounding refugee belonging and to highlight the reconfiguration of border sites in the Australian imaginary, is a particular focus of this work.

The QUT innovation space : a trans-disciplinary learning environment for entrepreneurship education : final report

In the current climate of global economic volatility, there are increasing calls for training in enterprising skills and entrepreneurship to underpin the systemic innovation required for even medium-term business sustainability. The skills long-recognised as the essential for entrepreneurship now appear on the list of employability skills demanded by industry. The QUT Innovation Space (QIS) was an experiment aimed at delivering entrepreneurship education (EE), as an extra-curricular platform across the university, to the undergraduate students of an Australian higher education institute. It was an ambitious project that built on overseas models of EE studied during an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Teaching Fellowship (Collet, 2011) and implemented those approaches across an institute. Such EE approaches have not been attempted in an Australian university. The project tested resonance not only with the student population, from the perspective of what worked and what didn’t work, but also with every level of university operations. Such information is needed to inform the development of EE in the Australian university landscape. The QIS comprised a physical co-working space, virtual sites (web, Twitter and Facebook) and a network of entrepreneurial mentors, colleagues, and students. All facets of the QIS enabled connection between like-minded individuals that underpins the momentum needed for a project of this nature. The QIS became an innovation community within QUT. This report serves two purposes. First, as an account of the QIS project and its evolution, the report serves to identify the student demand for skills and training as well as barriers and facilitators of the activities that promote EE in an Australian university context. Second, the report serves as a how-to manual, in the tradition of many tomes on EE, outlining the QIS activities that worked as well as those that failed. The activities represent one measure of QIS outcomes and are described herein to facilitate implementation in other institutes. The QIS initially aimed to adopt an incubation model for training in EE. The ‘learning by doing’ model for new venture creation is a highly successful and high profile training approach commonly found in overseas contexts. However, the greatest demand of the QUT student population was not for incubation and progression of a developed entrepreneurial intent, but rather for training that instilled enterprising skills in the individual. These two scenarios require different training approaches (Fayolle and Gailly, 2008). The activities of the QIS evolved to meet that student demand. In addressing enterprising skills, the QIS developed the antecedents of entrepreneurialism (i.e., entrepreneurial attitudes, motivation and behaviours) including high-level skills around risk-taking, effective communication, opportunity recognition and action-orientation. In focusing on the would-be entrepreneur and not on the (initial) idea per se, the QIS also fostered entrepreneurial outcomes that would never have gained entry to the rigid stage-gated incubation model proposed for the original QIS framework. Important lessons learned from the project for development of an innovation community include the need to: 1. Evaluate the context of the type of EE program to be delivered and the student demand for the skills training (as noted above). 2. Create a community that builds on three dimensions: a physical space, a virtual environment and a network of mentors and partners. 3. Supplement the community with external partnerships that aid in delivery of skills training materials. 4. Ensure discovery of the community through the use of external IT services to deliver advertising and networking outlets. 5. Manage unrealistic student expectations of billion dollar products. 6. Continuously renew and rebuild simple activities to maintain student engagement. 7. Accommodate the non-university end-user group within the community. 8. Recognise and address the skills bottlenecks that serve as barriers to concept progression; in this case, externally provided IT and programming skills. 9. Use available on-line and published resources rather than engage in constructing project-specific resources that quickly become obsolete. 10. Avoid perceptions of faculty ownership and operate in an increasingly competitive environment. 11. Recognise that the continuum between creativity/innovation and entrepreneurship is complex, non-linear and requires different training regimes during the different phases of the pipeline. One small entity, such as the QIS, cannot address them all. The QIS successfully designed, implemented and delivered activities that included events, workshops, seminars and services to QUT students in the extra-curricular space. That the QIS project can be considered successful derives directly from the outcomes. First, the QIS project changed the lives of emerging QUT student entrepreneurs. Also, the QIS activities developed enterprising skills in students who did not necessarily have a business proposition, at the time. Second, successful outcomes of the QIS project are evidenced as the embedding of most, perhaps all, of the QIS activities in a new Chancellery-sponsored initiative: the Leadership Development and Innovation Program hosted by QUT Student Support Services. During the course of the QIS project, the Brisbane-based innovation ecosystem underwent substantial change. From a dearth of opportunities for the entrepreneurially inclined, there is now a plethora of entities that cater for a diversity of innovation-related activities. While the QIS evolved with the landscape, the demand endpoint of the QIS activities still highlights a gap in the local and national innovation ecosystems. The freedom to experiment and to fail is not catered for by the many new entities seeking to build viable businesses on the back of the innovation push. The onus of teaching the enterprising skills, which are the employability skills now demanded by industry, remains the domain of the higher education sector.

A finite volume scheme with preconditioned Lanczos method for two-dimensional space-fractional reaction–diffusion equations

Fractional differential equations have been increasingly used as a powerful tool to model the non-locality and spatial heterogeneity inherent in many real-world problems. However, a constant challenge faced by researchers in this area is the high computational expense of obtaining numerical solutions of these fractional models, owing to the non-local nature of fractional derivatives. In this paper, we introduce a finite volume scheme with preconditioned Lanczos method as an attractive and high-efficiency approach for solving two-dimensional space-fractional reaction–diffusion equations. The computational heart of this approach is the efficient computation of a matrix-function-vector product f(A)bf(A)b, where A A is the matrix representation of the Laplacian obtained from the finite volume method and is non-symmetric. A key aspect of our proposed approach is that the popular Lanczos method for symmetric matrices is applied to this non-symmetric problem, after a suitable transformation. Furthermore, the convergence of the Lanczos method is greatly improved by incorporating a preconditioner. Our approach is show-cased by solving the fractional Fisher equation including a validation of the solution and an analysis of the behaviour of the model.

The role of active locomotion in space perception

It has been shown that active control of locomotion increases accuracy and precision of nonvisual space perception, but psychological mechanisms of this enhancement are poorly understood. The present study explored a hypothesis that active control of locomotion enhances space perception by facilitating crossmodal interaction between visual and nonvisual spatial information. In an experiment, blindfolded participants walked along a linear path under one of the following two conditions: (1) They walked by themselves following a guide rope; and (2) they were led by an experimenter. Subsequently, they indicated the walked distance by tossing a beanbag to the origin of locomotion. The former condition gave participants greater control of their locomotion, and thus represented a more active walking condition. In addition, before each trial, half the participants viewed the room in which they performed the distance perception task. The other half remained blindfolded throughout the experiment. Results showed that although the room was devoid of any particular cues for walked distances, visual knowledge of the surroundings improved the precision of nonvisual distance perception. Importantly, however, the benefit of preview was observed only when participants walked more actively. This indicates that active control of locomotion allowed participants to better utilize their visual memory of the environment for perceiving nonvisually encoded distance, suggesting that active control of locomotion served as a catalyst for integrating visual and nonvisual information to derive spatial representations of higher quality.

SCRAMSPACE : Radical-Farming Scramjet for access to space

Scramjet-based launch systems offer considerable promise for safe, reliable and economical access to space. A general Scramjets introduction is first provided, followed by the specifics of Australian Scramjet Research and the recent progress in inlet-injection radical-farming scramjets as part of the SCRAMSPACE program. Through both flight and ground tests, leveraging Australias world leadership in scramjet R&D, the SCRAMSPACE project is designed to answer key scientific and technological questions and build an industry-ready talent pool for a future Australian space industry. An extensive descriptions of all phases of the development of the SCRAMSPACE I scramjet-powered free-flight experiment are described in these lecture notes.

A three-phase to single-phase matrix converter based bi-directional IPT system for charging electric vehicles

This paper presents a novel three-phase to single-phase matrix converter (TSMC) based bi-directional inductive power transfer (IPT) system for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) applications. In contrast to existing techniques, the proposed technique which employs a TSMC to drive an 8th order high frequency resonant network, requires only a single-stage power conversion process to facilitate bi-directional power transfer between electric vehicles (EVs) and a three-phase utility power supply. A mathematical model is presented to demonstrate that both magnitude and direction of power flow can be controlled by regulating either relative phase angles or magnitudes of voltages generated by converters. The viability of the proposed mathematical model is verified using simulated results of a 10 kW bi-directional IPT system and the results suggest that the proposed system is efficient, reliable and is suitable for high power applications which require contactless power transfer.

Art spaces, public space, and the link to community development

Recent literature credits community art spaces with both enhancing social interaction and engagement and generating economic revitalization. This article argues that the ability of art spaces to realize these outcomes is linked to their role as public spaces and that their community development potential can be expanded with greater attention to this role. An analysis of the public space characteristics is useful because it encourages consideration of sometimes overlooked issues, particularly the effect of the physical environment on outcomes related to community development. I examine the relationship between public space and community development at various types of art spaces including artist cooperatives, ethnic-specific art spaces, and city-sponsored art centers in central city and suburban locations. This study shows that through their programming and other activities, art spaces serve various public space roles related to community development. However, the ability of many to perform as public spaces is hindered by facility design issues and poor physical connections in their surrounding area. This article concludes with proposals for enhancing the community development role of the art spaces through their function as public spaces.

Indigenous epistemology : creating an international Indigenous higher education space in the wake of the western “university of excellence”

Interest in the participation of Indigenous peoples in higher education has, in recent times, gained momentum with an increasing number of advocates challenging the global history of culturally inept policies and practices imposed within the western higher education system. To address the challenges being presented by Indigenous communities and other groups (often relegated under the banner of disadvantaged or equity) Western Universities are promoting a shift toward inclusive policies and practices. Frustrated with the offerings of the Western Higher Education system, a global movement of Indigenous academics, Elders and knowledge holders are developing strategies to meet the educational needs of their own communities, in order to find a way forward. The mobilization of Elders and Indigenous academics has resulted in the development of a global higher education network which is proving to be a significant force in changing the position of Indigenous participation in higher education. The World Indigenous Network Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC) has presented a significant challenge to those barriers within the western higher education system that has historically demonstrated an inability to develop culturally inclusive practices within their institutions. This paper examines the development of a world Indigenous higher education movement and its contribution to the history of the “university” within the context of western higher education institutions. Outlined in this examination will be a synopsis of the development of the “University of Excellence” and the creation of an international Indigenous space within higher education.