This thesis investigates the use of Carrier-phase Differential GPS (CDGPS) in relative navigation filters for formation flying spacecraft. This work analyzes the relationship between the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) design parameters and the resulting estimation accuracies, and in particular, the…

Recent advances in biology have afforded scientists with the knowledge that polysaccharides play an active role in modulating cellular activities. Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) are one such family of polysaccharides that play a very important role in regulating the functions of numerous…

A system for visual recognition is described, with implications for the general problem of representation of knowledge to assist control. The immediate objective is a computer system that will recognize objects in a visual scene, specifically hammers. The computer receives…

This report develops a conceptual framework in which to talk about mathematical knowledge. There are several broad categories of mathematical knowledge: results which contain the traditional logical aspects of mathematics; examples which contain illustrative material; and concepts which include formal…

This report shows how knowledge about the visual world can be built into a shape representation in the form of a descriptive vocabulary making explicit the important geometrical relationships comprising objects' shapes. Two computational tools are offered: (1) Shapestokens are…

This report investigates some techinques appropriate to representing the knowledge necessary for understanding a class of electronic machines -- radio receivers. A computational performance model - WATSON - is presented. WATSONs task is to isolate failures in radio receivers whose…

The goal of the work reported here is to capture the commonsense knowledge of non-expert human contributors. Achieving this goal will enable more intelligent human-computer interfaces and pave the way for computers to reason about our world. In the domain…

This thesis investigates what knowledge is necessary to solve mechanics problems. A program NEWTON is described which understands and solves problems in mechanics mini-world of objects moving on surfaces. Facts and equations such as those given in mechanics text need…

If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broad purpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systems that can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsense knowledge that we humans have…

One very useful idea in AI research has been the notion of an explicit model of a problem situation. Procedural deduction languages, such as PLANNER, have been valuable tools for building these models. But PLANNER and its relatives are very…