Linking Research and Marketing: A Pharmaceutical Innovation

This chapter describes in very general terms the integration of clinical research and marketing, drawing on books by marketers and recent cases that have come to the public eye. The tools that have been used to accomplish this integration over the past half-century are various, but they all stem from a realization that in a rational world centered on health there need be no intrinsic divide between research and marketing. Most obviously, marketing drugs to physicians, who are professionals acting within their own spheres, depends crucially on research. Physicians respond, and need to see themselves as responding, to fact, figures, and studies. The well-chosen images and vehicles for marketing campaigns must be subordinated to research. Yet at the same time research is a means of increasing sales.

Estimating the Heading of a Husky Mobile Robot with a LiDAR Compass based on Direction Maps

Without an absolute position sensor (e.g., GPS), an accurate heading estimate is necessary for proper localization of an autonomous unmanned vehicle or robot. This paper introduces direction maps (DMs), which represent the directions of only dominant surfaces of the vehicle’s environment and can be created with negligible effort. Given an environment with reoccurring surface directions (e.g., walls, buildings, parked cars), lines extracted from laser scans can be matched with a DM to provide an extremely lightweight heading estimate that is shown, through experimentation, to drastically reduce the growth of heading errors. The algorithm was tested using a Husky A200 mobile robot in a warehouse environment over traverses hundreds of metres in length. When a simple a priori DM was provided, the resulting heading estimation showed virtually no error growth.