Bioinspired autonomous visual vertical control of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle

Near-ground maneuvers, such as hover, approach, and landing, are key elements of autonomy in unmanned aerial vehicles. Such maneuvers have been tackled conventionally by measuring or estimating the velocity and the height above the ground, often using ultrasonic or laser range finders. Near-ground maneuvers are naturally mastered by flying birds and insects because objects below may be of interest for food or shelter. These animals perform such maneuvers efficiently using only the available vision and vestibular sensory information. In this paper, the time-tocontact (tau) theory, which conceptualizes the visual strategy with which many species are believed to approach objects, is presented as a solution for relative ground distance control for unmanned aerial vehicles. The paper shows how such an approach can be visually guided without knowledge of height and velocity relative to the ground. A control scheme that implements the tau strategy is developed employing only visual information from a monocular camera and an inertial measurement unit. To achieve reliable visual information at a high rate, a novel filtering system is proposed to complement the control system. The proposed system is implemented onboard an experimental quadrotor unmannedaerial vehicle and is shown to not only successfully land and approach ground, but also to enable the user to choose the dynamic characteristics of the approach. The methods presented in this paper are applicable to both aerial and space autonomous vehicles.

Do consumers want public or private bodies to monitor animal friendly production and marketing schemes? And does trust matter?

Producing according to enhanced farm animal welfare (FAW) standards increases costs along the livestock value chain, especially for monitoring certified animal friendly products. In the choice between public or private bodies for carrying out and monitoring certification, consumer preferences and trust play a role. We explore this issue by applying logit analysis involving socio-economic and psychometric variables to survey data from Italy. Results identify marked consumer preferences for public bodies and trust in stakeholders a key determinant.

Vehicle subtype, make and model classification from side profile video

This paper addresses the challenging domain of vehicle classification from pole-mounted roadway cameras, specifically from side-profile views. A new public vehicle dataset is made available consisting of over 10000 side profile images (86 make/model and 9 sub-type classes). 5 state-of-the-art classifiers are applied to the dataset, with the best achieving high classification rates of 98.7% for sub-type and 99.7- 99.9% for make and model recognition, confirming the assertion made that single vehicle side profile images can be used for robust classification.

Regurgitated bodies: presenting and representing trauma in 'The Act of Killing'

Focusing on The Act of Killing, this chapter examines how an “ethics of realism” operates on three key cinematic arenas: genre, authorship and spectatorship. As far as genre is concerned, the film’s realist commitment emerges from where it is least expected, namely from Hollywood genres, such as the musical, the film noir and the western, which are used as documentary, that is to say, as a fantasy realm where perpetrators can confess to their crimes without restraints or fear of punishment, but which nonetheless retains the evidentiary weight of the audiovisual medium. Authorship, in turn, translates as Oppenheimer’s unmistakable auteur signature through his role of self-confessed “infiltrator” who disguises as a sympathiser of the criminals in order to gain first-hand access to the full picture of their acts. One of them, the protagonist Anwar Congo, is clearly affected by post-traumatic stress disorder, and his repetitive reliving of his killings is made to flare up in front of the camera so as to bring back the dead to the present time in their material reality, through his own body, including a harrowing scene of the actor’s unpredictable and uncontrollable retching as he re-enacts the killing of his victims through strangulation. Finally, in the realm of spectatorship, the usual process of illusionistic identification on the part of the spectator is turned onto its head by means of disguising these criminals as amateur filmmakers, led to shoot, act within, and then watch their own film within the film so as to force them to experience beyond any illusion the suffering they had caused.