Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Oppel III, Fred J..
This package contains, for the most part, the base classes and interfaces for vehicles and characters. Originally everything was in UGV, but things were split out to simplify the design since the assertion of UGV1.0. Modules in UGV, UWV, and UAV will inherit from classes in this package. There is also a high-level system that is a base class for systems in UGV, UWV, and UAV.
This package contains modules that model a visual sensor in Umbra. It is typically used to represent eyesight of characters in Umbra. This library also includes the sensor property, seeable, and an Active Denial sensor.
Umbra is a flexible simulation framework for complex systems that can be used by itself for modeling, simulation, and analysis, or to create specific applications. It has been applied to many operations, primarily dealing with robotics and system of system simulations. This version, from 4.8 to 4.8.3b, incorporates bug fixes, refactored code, and new managed C++ wrapper code that can be used to bridge new applications written in C# to the C++ libraries. The new managed C++ wrapper code includes (project/directories) BasicSimulation, CSharpUmbraInterpreter, LogFileView, UmbraAboutBox, UmbraControls, UmbraMonitor and UmbraWrapper.
As Modeling and Simulation (M&S) tools have matured, their applicability and importance have increased across many national security challenges. In particular, they provide a way to test how something may behave without the need to do real world testing. However, current and future changes across several factors including capabilities, policy, and funding are driving a need for rapid response or evaluation in ways that many M&S tools cannot address. Issues around large data, computational requirements, delivery mechanisms, and analyst involvement already exist and pose significant challenges. Furthermore, rising expectations, rising input complexity, and increasing depth of analysis will only increase the difficulty of these challenges. In this study we examine whether innovations in M&S software coupled with advances in ''cloud'' computing and ''big-data'' methodologies can overcome many of these challenges. In particular, we propose a simple, horizontally-scalable distributed computing environment that could provide the foundation (i.e. ''cloud'') for next-generation M&S-based applications based on the notion of ''parallel multi-simulation''. In our context, the goal of parallel multi- simulation is to consider as many simultaneous paths of execution as possible. Therefore, with sufficient resources, the complexity is dominated by the cost of single scenario runs as opposed to the number of runs required. We show the feasibility of this architecture through a stable prototype implementation coupled with the Umbra Simulation Framework [6]. Finally, we highlight the utility through multiple novel analysis tools and by showing the performance improvement compared to existing tools.