i++ Departmental Newsletter

Week commencing 25 August 2008

Previous Newsletters

Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge: Essex roboticists play key part in team winning trophy for most innovative idea.

Below: Renzo de Nardi with a quadrotor

CES students and graduates played a major role in winning the award for the most innovative idea in the Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge 2008 event, held last week, in which 11 teams drawn from industry and universities demonstrated a range of novel technologies to a panel of MoD judges. The challenge, organised as a  science and technology competition, was "to create a system with a high degree of autonomy that can detect, identify, locate and report a comprehensive range of military threats in an urban environment". Team Swarm, led by the entrepreneur Stephen Crampton, had spent the last year developing a swarm of small quadrotors (Owls) able to navigate through an urban environment while taking high resolution photographs of potential threats. PhD student Renzo de Nardi, working closely with Essex graduate Richard Newcombe (now a PhD student at Imperial College), developed the Owls' sophisticated navigation and control system as a spin-off from his PhD research, in which he is studying the problems involved in controlling swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Renzo's supervisor, Professor Owen Holland, who acted as a robotics consultant to Team Swarm, said "This is a tremendous achievement for Renzo and Richard. It shows that university-based innovations and skills can really compete with the best from industry."

Read more from the Guardian Newspaper supplement.

NEW STUDENTSHIP

A new EPSRC-GLA's Industrial Case Studentship is now available - Modelling the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to investigate its availability, network topography and impact on aid-to-navigation (AtoN) provision to enhance maritime safety.

Applications are invited for a three-year PhD Studentship, jointly sponsored by the General Lighthouse Authorities and the EPSRC. The Studentship provides an opportunity to carry out research and industrial training in a three-year programme leading to a PhD.

Paper Accepted

Nigel J. Newton, Interactive Statistical Mechanics and Nonlinear Filtering,  Journal of Statistical Physics

Abstract -

This paper connects non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and optimal nonlinear filtering.  The latter concerns the observation-conditional behaviour of Markov `signal' processes, and thus provides a tool for investigating statistical mechanics with partial observations.  These allow entropy reduction, illustrating Landauer's Principle in a quantitative way.
 
The joint process comprising a signal and its nonlinear filter is irreversible in its invariant distribution, which therefore corresponds to a {\em non-equilibrium} stationary state of the associated `joint' system.
Macroscopic entropy and energy flows are identified for this state.
Since these are driven by observations {\em internal} to the system, they do not cause entropy increase, and so the joint system makes statistical mechanical sense in reverse time.
 
Time reversal yields a {\em dual} system in which the signal and filter exchange roles.  Despite the structural similarity of the original and dual systems, there is a substantial asymmetry in their complexities.
This reveals the direction of time, despite the systems being in stationary states that do not produce entropy.