Boston's Commuter Comeback
More than 30 years after its abandonment, the Old Colony Railroad in Massachusetts is being revived through a �480 million rehabilitation project to serve residents southeast of Boston....
When the Levee Breaks
As repairs to the billions of dollars in damages left by the Mississippi and Missouri floods continue, many engineers believe it is time to step back and see if there are better ways of...
Checking Concrete Growth
When the Tennessee Valley Authority built its dams in the 1930s, instrumentation installed in the massive concrete detected a defect that would later cause major problems: concrete growth...
Money-Saving Model
Determining whether dams and spillways along a river are adequate to handle potential floods can have far-reaching financial, as well as human ramifications. Watershed modeling studies...
The Winds of Change?
In 1992, Hurricanes Andrew and Iniki combined to generate an estimated $30 billion in damage. The storms also generated their share of reports and recommendations about how best to mitigate...
Aftershocks: The Legacy of Loma Prieta
It wasn't the fabled Big One--quite--but it came close enough. The Magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake that struck just after 5:00 p.m. on October 17, 1989 killed 63 people...
Trenchless Relief
During wet weather, stormwater infiltration/inflow into the sewer system increases wastewater flows by 8-12 times the average dry weather flow in several interceptors operated by the Central...
Depressing Traffic Top-Down
Top down construction will permit the City and County of Denver to maintain traffic at two congested intersections while a tunnel is driven below them. The project, which will carry Speer...
Doubling A Pipeline
The 36 in. natural gas pipeline built 32 years ago by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) its subsidiary Pacific Gas Transmission (PGT) from Canadian fields to central California has...
The Role of Computer Graphics in Teleoperation
Computer graphics techniques developed by the Advanced Teleoperation (ATOP) Project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the control of remote manipulators, primarily for space applications,...
Real-time Motion Vision for Robot Control in Unstructured Environments
The control of robots in unstructured environments demands real-time, general purpose vision. We have designed a visual tracking system which makes use of motion to pick out and track...
Application of Virtual Reality to Space Robotics Operations
This paper discusses a Virtual Reality (VR) simulation under development by the Automation and Robotics (A&R) Division at the Johnson Space Center (JSC). Over the past twelve years,...
Human Extender: A Material Handling System
A human's ability to perform physical tasks is limited by physical strength, not by intelligence. `Extenders' are a class of robot manipulators worn by humans to augment human mechanical...
Navigation of an Autonomous Robot Vehicle
The U.S. Air Force has developed an autonomous excavator capable of performing a variety of tasks at various Department of Defense facilities. Common to all the tasks is the need for autonomous...
A Feature Based Path Planning System for Robotic Stenciling of Roadway Markings
Roadway sign stenciling is a hazardous operation exposing the roadway maintenance and construction crew to on going traffic. The current practice involves manual painting using a mechanical...
GPS-Based Control for Space Vehicle Rendezvous
The recent advent of Differential Carrier Phase Global Position System (GPS) sensing has made it possible to determine relative positions of GPS receiver-equipped systems to less than...
Navigation of Autonomous Mobile Robots
An integrated navigational system for autonomous mobile robots features a primary navigator, such as an inertial navigation or a dead-reckoning system, and a secondary navigator. The secondary...
Autonomous Navigation for Structured Exterior Environments
The Telemanaged Mobile Security Station (TMSS) was developed at Sandia National Laboratories to investigate the role of mobile robotics in exterior perimeter security systems. A major...
Developing Plans for Robotic Excavators
We would like a robot excavator that is able to excavate a volume of soil according to specification. To this end we have developed a general method that can be used to provide prescriptions...
Intelligent Excavator Control for a Lunar Mining System
The benefits of utilizing local planetary resources are a large reduction in the cost of lifting materials from the earth's surface into earth orbit. Since the moon is one of the closest...
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