Accommodating the multi-state constraint Kalman filter for visual-inertial navigation in a moving and stationary flight

For more than a decade, the multi-state constraint Kalman filter is used for visual-inertial navigation. Its advantages are the light-weight calculations, consistency, and similarity to the current mature GPS/INS Kalman filters. For using it in an airborne platform, an important deficiency exists. It diverges while the object stops moving. In this work, this deficiency is accounted for, by changing the state augmentation and measurement update policy from a time-based to horizontal travel-based scheme, and by reusing the oldest tracked point over and over. Besides the computational savings, it works infinitely with no extra errors in full-stops and with minor error build up in very low speeds.

The Philosophical Vision of Legal Punishment

The concept of punishment represents one of the most difficult legal issues that are related to the concept of human freedom and responsibility. Since Antiquity, the brilliant minds of humanity contemplated about the sense of punishment and the function of this institution. Each epoch analyses this concept from different aspects and some of them are reflected in the actual legislation. The most important principles of contemporary criminal law were expounded by the Ancient, Modern and Contemporary philosophers. The field of research of this article is the philosophy of punishment of criminal law. In this study, we have applied the method of historical research of the proposed topic, which gives us the opportunity to analyze the development of criminal punishment and its goals from a historical perspective. In this paper, we aimed to determine the philosophical base of the legal punishment that legitimizes the application of sanctions to the person who committed the crime. We established the importance of the theories developed by brilliant thinkers for the contemporary concept of penal retribution and legal regulation of this institution. This theme generates several discussions that are formed in the process of comparison and debating of the ideas of influential philosophers regarding the purpose of criminal punishment. Therefore, we consider that the analysis of the theories of great thinkers gives us the possibility to understand the complexity of the phenomenon of criminal punishment, and leads to the more effective application of state constraint towards the offender.

Continuity of the value function for deterministic optimal impulse control with terminal state constraint

Deterministic optimal impulse control problem with terminal state constraint is considered. Due to the appearance of the terminal state constraint, the value function might be discontinuous in general. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of an intrinsic condition under which the value function is proved to be continuous. Then by a Bellman dynamic programming principle, the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman type quasi-variational inequality (QVI, for short) is derived. The value function is proved to be a viscosity solution to such a QVI. The issue of whether the value function is characterized as the unique viscosity solution to this QVI is carefully addressed and the answer is left open challengingly.