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NASA NTRS1989

An optimal momentum management controller for the Space Station

This paper presents a new sequential design procedure for determining an optimal CMG (control moment gyro) momentum management and attitude control system for the Space Station Freedom. First, the Space Station equations of motion are linearized and uncoupled, and the associated state space equations are defined. Next, a new sequential procedure is used for the development of a continuous quadratic regulator with eigenvalue placement in a specified region of the complex plane. The regional pole assignment method is utilized since it is best suited for tradeoffs between eigenvalue locations and robustness with respect to parameter variations, sensor failures, implementation accuracies and gain reductions. The matrix sign function is used for solving the Riccati equations which appear in the design procedure. Simulation results are given which show that the resultant design provides desired system performance.

Sunkel, J. W.↗

NASA NTRS1990

Motion detection in astronomical and ice floe images

Two approaches are presented for establishing correspondence between small areas in pairs of successive images for motion detection. The first one, based on local correlation, is used on a pair of successive Voyager images of the Jupiter which differ mainly in locally variable translations. This algorithm is implemented on a sequential machine (VAX 780) as well as the Massively Parallel Processor (MPP). In the case of the sequential algorithm, the pixel correspondence or match is computed on a sparse grid of points using nonoverlapping windows (typically 11 x 11) by local correlations over a predetermined search area. The displacement of the corresponding pixels in the two images is called the disparities to cubic surfaces. The disparities at points where the error between the computed values and the surface values exceeds a particular threshold are replaced by the surface values. A bilinear interpolation is then used to estimate disparities at all other pixels between the grid points. When this algorithm was applied at the red spot in the Jupiter image, the rotating velocity field of the storm was determined. The second method of motion detection is applicable to pairs of images in which corresponding areas can experience considerable translation as well as rotation.

Manohar, M.↗

NASA NTRS1990

Photoresponse of YBa2Cu3O(7-delta) granular and epitaxial superconducting thin films

The response is reported of thin films of YBa2Cu3O(7-delta) with either a very grainy or a smooth epitaxial morphology to visible radiation. SrTiO3 substrates were employed for both types of films. The grainy films were formed by sequential multi-layer electron beam evaporation while the epitaxial films were formed by laser ablation. Both films were patterned into H shaped detectors via a negative photolithographic process employing a Br/ethanol etchant. The bridge region of the H was 50 microns wide. The patterned films formed by laser ablation and sequential evaporation had critical temperatures of 74 K and 72 K respectively. The bridge was current biased and illuminated with chopped He-Ne laser radiation and the voltage developed in response to the illumination was measured. A signal was detected only above the critical temperature and the peak of the response coincided with the resistive transition for both types of films although the correspondence was less exact for the grainy film. The details of the responses and their analysis are presented.

Valco, G. J.↗

NASA NTRS1989

Effects of cardiac phase on diameter measurements from coronary cineangiograms

The measurement variability of end-diastolic frames is compared with frames taken from the other portions of the cardiac cycle. Two computer measurements, average diameter and minimum, are obtained for every frame of two complete cardiac cycles in angiograms of 20 subjects. Six schemes for sampling frames in various portions of the cardiac cycle are defined and the standard deviation is calculated for pairs of measurements from each scheme. The results suggest that the best strategy for frame selection is to use sequential frames in end-diastole. However, it is noted that if random samples are taken anywhere in the cardiac cycle instead of sequentially in end-diastole, the variability of two vessel edge measures changes from 4.9 percent to 6.3 percent, which is considered to be a small penalty.

Selzer, Robert H.↗

NASA NTRS1990

The nondeterministic divide

The nondeterministic divide partitions a vector into two non-empty slices by allowing the point of division to be chosen nondeterministically. Support for high-level divide-and-conquer programming provided by the nondeterministic divide is investigated. A diva algorithm is a recursive divide-and-conquer sequential algorithm on one or more vectors of the same range, whose division point for a new pair of recursive calls is chosen nondeterministically before any computation is performed and whose recursive calls are made immediately after the choice of division point; also, access to vector components is only permitted during activations in which the vector parameters have unit length. The notion of diva algorithm is formulated precisely as a diva call, a restricted call on a sequential procedure. Diva calls are proven to be intimately related to associativity. Numerous applications of diva calls are given and strategies are described for translating a diva call into code for a variety of parallel computers. Thus diva algorithms separate logical correctness concerns from implementation concerns.

Charlesworth, Arthur↗

NASA NTRS1991

Emergency locating transmitter

A transmitter generates three signals for sequential transmission. These signal are an unmodulated r.f. carrier, a r.f. carrier amplitude modulated by a first audio frequency waveform and a r.f. carrier amplitude modulated by a second audio frequency waveform which is distinguishable from the first and which may be employed as a means for identifying a particular transmitter. The composite, sequentially transmitted signal may be varied in terms of the individual signal transmission sequence, the duration of the individual signals, overall composite signal repetition rate and the frequency of the second audio waveform. Various combinations of signal variations may be employed to transmit different information.

Wren, Paul E.↗

NASA NTRS1990

Photoresponse of YBa2Cu3O(7-delta) granular and epitaxial superconducting thin films

Valco, G. J.↗

NASA NTRS1992

Gear tooth stress measurements of two helicopter planetary stages

Two versions of the planetary reduction stages from U.S. Army OH-58 helicopter main rotor transmissions were tested at NASA Lewis. One sequential and one nonsequential planetary were tested. Sun gear and ring gear teeth strains were measured, and stresses were calculated from the strains. The alternating stress at the fillet of both the loaded and unloaded sides of the teeth and at the root of the sun gear teeth are reported. Typical stress variations as the gear tooth moves through mesh are illustrated. At the tooth root location of the thin rimmed sun gear, a significant stress was produced by a phenomenon other than the passing of a planet gear. The load variation among the planets was studied. Each planet produced its own distinctive load distribution on the ring and sun gears. The load variation was less for a three planet, nonsequential design as compared to that of a four planet, sequential design. The reported results enhance the data base for gear stress levels and provide data for the validation of analytical methods.

Krantz, Timothy L.↗

NASA NTRS1992

Sea surface velocities from visible and infrared multispectral atmospheric mapping sensor imagery

High resolution (100 m), sequential Multispectral Atmospheric Mapping Sensor (MAMS) images were used in a study to calculate advective surface velocities using the Maximum Cross Correlation (MCC) technique. Radiance and brightness temperature gradient magnitude images were formed from visible (0.48 microns) and infrared (11.12 microns) image pairs, respectively, of Chandeleur Sound, which is a shallow body of water northeast of the Mississippi delta, at 145546 GMT and 170701 GMT on 30 Mar. 1989. The gradient magnitude images enhanced the surface water feature boundaries, and a lower cutoff on the gradient magnitudes calculated allowed the undesirable sunglare and backscatter gradients in the visible images, and the water vapor absorption gradients in the infrared images, to be reduced in strength. Requiring high (greater than 0.4) maximum cross correlation coefficients and spatial coherence of the vector field aided in the selection of an optimal template size of 10 x 10 pixels (first image) and search limit of 20 pixels (second image) to use in the MCC technique. Use of these optimum input parameters to the MCC algorithm, and high correlation and spatial coherence filtering of the resulting velocity field from the MCC calculation yielded a clustered velocity distribution over the visible and infrared gradient images. The velocity field calculated from the visible gradient image pair agreed well with a subjective analysis of the motion, but the velocity field from the infrared gradient image pair did not. This was attributed to the changing shapes of the gradient features, their nonuniqueness, and large displacements relative to the mean distance between them. These problems implied a lower repeat time for the imagery was needed in order to improve the velocity field derived from gradient imagery. Suggestions are given for optimizing the repeat time of sequential imagery when using the MCC method for motion studies. Applying the MCC method to the infrared brightness temperature imagery yielded a velocity field which did agree with the subjective analysis of the motion and that derived from the visible gradient imagery. Differences between the visible and infrared derived velocities were 14.9 cm/s in speed and 56.7 degrees in direction. Both of these velocity fields also agreed well with the motion expected from considerations of the ocean bottom topography and wind and tidal forcing in the study area during the 2.175 hour time interval.

Pope, P. A.↗

NASA NTRS1992

Preloaded latching device

A latching device is disclosed which is lever operated sequentially to actuate a set of collet fingers to provide a radial expansion and to actuate a force mechanism to provide a compressive gripping force for attaching first and second devices to one another. The latching device includes a body member having elongated collet fingers which, in a deactuated condition, is insertable through bores on the first and second devices so that gripping terminal portions on the collet fingers are proximate to the end of the bore of the first device while a spring assembly on the body member is located proximate to the outer surface of a second device. A lever is rotatable through 90 deg to move a latching rod to sequentially actuate and expand collet fingers and to actuate the spring assembly by compressing it. During the first 30 deg of movement of the lever, the collet fingers are actuated by the latching rod to provide a radial expansion and during the last 60 deg of movement of the lever, the spring assembly acts as a force mechanism and is actuated to develop a compressive latching force on the devices. The latching rod and lever are connected by a camming mechanism. The amount of spring force in the spring assembly can be adjusted; the body member can be permanently attached by a telescoping assembly to one of the devices; and the structure can be used as a pulling device for removing annular bearings or the like from blind bores.

Wesselski, Clarence J.↗

NASA NTRS1992

Detecting change as it occurs

Traditionally climate changes have been detected from long series of observations and long after they have happened. Our 'inverse sequential' procedure, for detecting change as soon as it occurs, describes the existing or most recent data by their frequency distribution. Its parameter(s) are estimated both from the existing set of observations and from the same set augmented by 1,2,....j new observations. Individual-value probability products ('likelihoods') are used to form ratios which yield two probabilities for erroneously accepting the existing parameter(s) as valid for the augmented data set, and vice versa. A genuine parameter change is signaled when these probabilities (or a more stable compound probability) show a progressive decrease. New parameter values can then be estimated from the new observations alone using standard statistical techniques. The inverse sequential procedure will be illustrated for global annual mean temperatures (assumed normally distributed), and for annual numbers of North Atlantic hurricanes (assumed to represent Poisson distributions). The procedure was developed, but not yet tested, for linear or exponential trends, and for chi-squared means or degrees of freedom, a special measure of autocorrelation.

Radok, Uwe↗

NASA NTRS1992

Efficient use of high performance computers for integrated controls and structures design

Simply transporting design codes from sequential-scalar computers to parallel-vector computers does not fully utilize the computational benefits offered by high performance computers. By performing integrated controls and structures design on an experimental truss platform with both sequential-scalar and parallel-vector design codes, conclusive results are presented to substantiate this claim. The efficiency of a Cholesky factorization scheme in conjunction with a variable-band row data structure is presented. In addition, the Lanczos eigensolution algorithm has been incorporated in the design code for both parallel and vector computations. Comparisons of computational efficiency between the initial design code and the parallel-vector design code are presented. It is shown that the Lanczos algorithm with the Cholesky factorization scheme is far superior to the sub-space iteration method of eigensolution when substantial numbers of eigenvectors are required for control design and/or performance optimization. Integrated design results show the need for continued efficiency studies in the area of element computations and matrix assembly.

Belvin, W. K.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Binary tree eigen solver in finite element analysis

This paper presents a transputer-based binary tree eigensolver for the solution of the generalized eigenproblem in linear elastic finite element analysis. The algorithm is based on the method of recursive doubling, which parallel implementation of a number of associative operations on an arbitrary set having N elements is of the order of o(log2N), compared to (N-1) steps if implemented sequentially. The hardware used in the implementation of the binary tree consists of 32 transputers. The algorithm is written in OCCAM which is a high-level language developed with the transputers to address parallel programming constructs and to provide the communications between processors. The algorithm can be replicated to match the size of the binary tree transputer network. Parallel and sequential finite element analysis programs have been developed to solve for the set of the least-order eigenpairs using the modified subspace method. The speed-up obtained for a typical analysis problem indicates close agreement with the theoretical prediction given by the method of recursive doubling.

Akl, F. A.↗

NASA NTRS1991

Pulse mode VLSI asynchronous circuits

A new basic VLSI circuit element is presented that can be used to realize pulse mode asynchronous sequential circuits. A synthesis procedure is developed along with an unconventional state assignment procedure. Level input asynchronous sequential circuits can be realized by converting a regular flow table into a differential mode flow table, thereby allowing the new synthesis technique to be general. The new circuits tolerate 1-1 crossovers. This circuit also provides a means for state sequence detection and real time fault detection.

Chen, Q.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Determining the 3-D structure and motion of objects using a scanning laser range sensor

In order for the EVAHR robot to autonomously track and grasp objects, its vision system must be able to determine the 3-D structure and motion of an object from a sequence of sensory images. This task is accomplished by the use of a laser radar range sensor which provides dense range maps of the scene. Unfortunately, the currently available laser radar range cameras use a sequential scanning approach which complicates image analysis. Although many algorithms have been developed for recognizing objects from range images, none are suited for use with single beam, scanning, time-of-flight sensors because all previous algorithms assume instantaneous acquisition of the entire image. This assumption is invalid since the EVAHR robot is equipped with a sequential scanning laser range sensor. If an object is moving while being imaged by the device, the apparent structure of the object can be significantly distorted due to the significant non-zero delay time between sampling each image pixel. If an estimate of the motion of the object can be determined, this distortion can be eliminated; but, this leads to the motion-structure paradox - most existing algorithms for 3-D motion estimation use the structure of objects to parameterize their motions. The goal of this research is to design a rigid-body motion recovery technique which overcomes this limitation. The method being developed is an iterative, linear, feature-based approach which uses the non-zero image acquisition time constraint to accurately recover the motion parameters from the distorted structure of the 3-D range maps. Once the motion parameters are determined, the structural distortion in the range images is corrected.

Nandhakumar, N.↗

NASA NTRS1994

Sea ice lead dynamics from ERS-1 SAR

The use of ERS-1 SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images to measure ice lead changes and ice deformation, and thus to determine their relationships and compare them to theory, is reported. ERS-1 SAR data collected at the Alaska (U.S.) SAR facility are processed into low resolution geocoded images which are used as input to the Geophysical Processor System (GPS). The GPS uses cross correlation and edge detection on sequential pairs of images to track a regular 5 km array of grid points. The result for each sequential image pair is a field of ice displacement that contains, on average, more than 200 vectors. The GPS also classifies all the pixels of the images into one of four ice types based on the normalized backscatter coefficients and a seasonal look-up table. This allows all pixels to be labeled as either multiyear ice or as the first year ice and open water that comprise leads.

Stern, Harry L.↗

NASA NTRS1994

Improved solution accuracy for Landsat-4 (TDRSS-user) orbit determination

This paper presents the results of a study to compare the orbit determination accuracy for a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) user spacecraft, Landsat-4, obtained using a Prototype Filter Smoother (PFS), with the accuracy of an established batch-least-squares system, the Goddard Trajectory Determination System (GTDS). The results of Landsat-4 orbit determination will provide useful experience for the Earth Observing System (EOS) series of satellites. The Landsat-4 ephemerides were estimated for the January 17-23, 1991, timeframe, during which intensive TDRSS tracking data for Landsat-4 were available. Independent assessments were made of the consistencies (overlap comparisons for the batch case and convariances for the sequential case) of solutions produced by the batch and sequential methods. The filtered and smoothed PFS orbit solutions were compared with the definitive GTDS orbit solutions for Landsat-4; the solution differences were generally less than 15 meters.

Oza, D. H.↗

NASA NTRS1994

Convolutional encoding of self-dual block codes (2)

Solomon and van Tilborg have developed convolutional encoding algorithms for quadratic residue (QR) codes of lengths 47 and beyond. For these codes and reasonable constraint lengths, there are sequential decodings that may be simple, as in a convolutional encoding/decoding of the extended Golay Code. In addition, the previously found constraint length K = 9 for the (48, 24; 12) QR code was lower to K = 8 by Solomon. In our search for the smallest possible constraint lengths K for (80, 40; 16) self-dual quadratic residue and nonquadratic residue codes, we have found the constraint lengths K = 14 and K = 13, respectively. We have discovered a K = 21 convolutional encoding for the (104, 52; 20) QR code; there may be a smaller K for a (104, 52; 20) self-dual code that is not a quadratic residue code. The smaller the K, the less complex the sequential or Viterbi decoder.

Solomon, G.↗