Long term Throughput and Approximate Capacity of Transmitter-Receiver Energy Harvesting Channel with Fading

We first consider an energy harvesting channel with fading, where only the transmitter harvests energy from natural sources. We bound the optimal long term throughput by a constant for a class of energy arrival distributions. The proposed method also gives a constant approximation to the capacity of the energy harvesting channel with fading. Next, we consider a more general system where both the transmitter and the receiver employ energy harvesting to power themselves. In this case, we show that finding an approximation to the optimal long term throughput is far more difficult, and identify a special case of unit battery capacity at both the transmitter and the receiver for which we obtain a universal bound on the ratio of the upper and lower bound on the long term throughput.Comment: To appear in ICCS 2014, Macau in Nov. 201

Electrodynamic actuators for rocket engine valves

Actuators, employed in acoustic loudspeakers, operate liquid rocket engine valves by replacing light paper cones with flexible metal diaphragms. Comparative analysis indicates better response time than solenoid actuators, and improved service life and reliability

Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes: A Semiparametric Regression Approach for Discovering Latent Task Parametrizations

Control applications often feature tasks with similar, but not identical, dynamics. We introduce the Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Process (HiP-MDP), a framework that parametrizes a family of related dynamical systems with a low-dimensional set of latent factors, and introduce a semiparametric regression approach for learning its structure from data. In the control setting, we show that a learned HiP-MDP rapidly identifies the dynamics of a new task instance, allowing an agent to flexibly adapt to task variations