In this paper a new PCA-based positioning sensor and localization system for mobile robots to operate in unstructured environments (e.g. industry, services, domestic. . . ) is proposed and experimentally validated. The inexpensive positioning system resorts to principal component analysis (PCA) of images acquired by a video camera installed onboard, looking upwards to the ceiling. This solution has the advantage of avoiding the need of selecting and extracting features. The principal components of the acquired images are compared with previously registered images, stored in a reduced onboard image database, and the position measured is fused with odometry data. The optimal estimates of position and slippage are provided by Kalman filters, with global stable error dynamics. The experimental validation reported in this work focuses on the results of a set of experiments carried out in a real environment, where the robot travels along a lawn-mower trajectory. A small position error estimate with bounded co-variance was always observed, for arbitrarily long experiments, and slippage was estimated accurately in real time.

The Tile Calorimeter, covering the central region of the ATLAS experiment up to pseudorapidities of ±1.7, is a sampling device built with scintillating tiles that alternate with iron plates. The light is collected in wavelength shifting (WLS) fibers and is read out with photomultipliers. In the characteristic geometry of this calorimeter the tiles lie in planes perpendicular to the beams, resulting in a very simple and modular mechanical and optical layout. This paper focuses on the procedures applied in the optical instrumentation of the calorimeter, which involved the assembly of about 460,000 scintillator tiles and 550,000 WLS fibers. The outcome is a hadronic calorimeter that meets the ATLAS performance requirements, as shown in this paper.

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This paper summarises the mechanical construction and installation of the Tile Calorimeter for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Switzerland. The Tile Calorimeter is a sampling calorimeter using scintillator as the sensitive detector and steel as the absorber and covers the central region of the ATLAS experiment up to pseudorapidities ±1.7. The mechanical construction of the Tile Calorimeter occurred over a period of about 10 years beginning in 1995 with the completion of the Technical Design Report and ending in 2006 with the installation of the final module in the ATLAS cavern. During this period approximately 2600 metric tons of steel were transformed into a laminated structure to form the absorber of the sampling calorimeter. Following instrumentation and testing, which is described elsewhere, the modules were installed in the ATLAS cavern with a remarkable accuracy for a structure of this size and weight. KEYWORDS: Detector design and construction technologies and materials; Calorimeters JINST 8 T11001Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Design overview 2 3 Submodule construction 9 4 Module production 12 4.1 Module construction 13 4.2 Girder ring insertion 15 4.3 Installation of fiducial marks 15 5 Calorimeter installation 16