No abstract

No abstract

Abstract.CoaX is a micro-helicopter designed for the research and education markets by Skybotix AG in Switzerland. It is a unique robotic coaxial helicopter equipped with state of the art sensors and processors: an integrated Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a pressure sensor, a down-looking sonar, three side looking range sensors and a color camera. To communicate with a ground station, the robot has a Bluetooth (or XBee) module and an optional WiFi module. Additionally, the CoaX supports the Overo series of tiny computers from Gumstix and is ready to fly out of the box with a set of attitude and altitude control functions. One can also control the system through an open-source API to give high-level commands for taking-off, landing or any other type of motion. In addition to presenting the CoaX, this paper reports on three experiments conducted to demonstrate the system's motto: "simple to fly, simple to program, simple to extend".

Abstract. How has a stack of n blocks to be arranged in order to maximize its overhang over a table edge while being stable? This question can be seen as an example application for applied statics and at the same time leads to a challenging optimization problem that was discussed recently in two theoretical studies.Here, we address this problem by designing an evolutionary algorithm; the proposed method is applied to two instances of the block stacking problem, maximizing the overhang for 20 and 50 block stacks. The study demonstrates that the stacking problem is worthwhile to be investigated in the context of randomized search algorithms: it represents an abstract, but still demanding instance of many real-world applications. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm may become useful in empirically testing the tightness of theoretical upper bounds proposed for this problem.