A quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) must achieve desired flight missions despite internal uncertainties and external disturbances. This paper proposes an adaptive trajectory tracking control method that attenuates unknown uncertainties and disturbances. Although the quadrotor is underactuated, a fully actuated controller is designed using backstepping control. To avoid repeated derivatives of control inputs, a dynamic surface method introduces a filter and auxiliary controller. Lyapunov criteria guide adaptive laws for tuning controller gain and filters. A low-power observer is integrated for state estimation. Additionally, a disturbance observer is developed and combined with the control scheme to handle unknown disturbances. Simulations on a DJI F450 quadrotor demonstrate that the proposed control algorithm offers strong trajectory-tracking performance and system stability under multiple uncertainties and external disturbances during flight.

Many views of moral agency include, implicitly or explicitly, a consciousness requirement—namely, the claim that phenomenal consciousness is a necessary condition of moral agency. This paper casts doubt on the consciousness requirement. I argue that consciousness is not necessary for instantiating four key capacities necessary for moral agency: action, moral concept possession, responsiveness to moral reasons, and moral understanding. I defend my picture of nonconscious moral agency as a plausible account of an entity that can act for moral reasons and can be morally responsible. Lastly, I discuss broader implications of my argument, especially on the possibility of artificial moral agency.

The development of childcare policy can be understood as a process shaped by conflicts across multiple, interconnected dimensions of policymaking. Whilst existing literature often emphasises tensions between established policy legacies and emerging paradigms such as work–family reconciliation and social investment, this study introduces a multi-dimensional framework that includes conflict and negotiation processes between competing policies co-existing within the policy domain but also within policies themselves, emphasising the dynamics of self-reinforcing and self-undermining feedbacks. Our analysis reveals how efforts to resolve tensions in one policy dimension can inadvertently trigger new conflicts in other dimensions. By examining the South Korean case over three decades, we demonstrate how such interwoven tensions drive long-term policy change, offering scholars a more nuanced understanding of the complex mechanisms underlying policy evolution.

The aim of this study was to estimate genetic parameters for dairy traits (daily milk yield (DMY), daily milk fat yield (DMFY), and daily milk protein yield (DMPY)) and somatic cell score (SCS) of Iranian Murciano-Granadina goats. The analysis involved 99,839 records from 4,307 does, spanning from 2015 to 2021. A single-trait animal model was used to obtain estimates of genetic and residual (co)variances and heritabilities. In the model, both fixed effects (birth year, parity, litter size, age dam (day)) and random effects (additive animal genetic effects) were considered. R software was used to evaluate environmental effects, assess the model, examine genetic and phenotypic trends, and determine genetic-environmental correlations. Additionally, variance components and heritability were estimated using the Gibbs1f90 software. The heritability of dairy traits and SCS trait, namely DMY, DMFY, DMPY, and SCS, was estimated to be 0.244, 0.133, 0.188, and 0.023, respectively. The genetic correlations between DMY and DMFY, DMY and DMPY, DMY and somatic cell score (SCS), DMFY and DMPY, DMFY and SCS, and DMPY and SCS were 0.07, 0.16, 0.42, –0.08, –0.005, and 0.04, respectively. The study found moderate heritability for milk yield traits and low heritability for somatic cell score. Genetic correlations varied, with the strongest correlation between daily milk yield and somatic cell score, indicating useful genetic linkages for selective breeding.

This article examines the development of colonial public culture in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, over the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on two moments of extended colonial ceremony: the city’s 250th anniversary in 1869 and the inauguration of Queen Wilhelmina in 1898. The analysis shows that over the course of the century, colonial ceremonial increasingly sought to assimilate facets of local cultural practices, while also expanding spatially into a more diverse set of neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, this new and superficially more representative order still maintained a strict internal hierarchy embedded in spatial and socio-cultural boundaries.

I reconfigure Hegel’s distinction between Tat (deed) and Handlung (action) to illuminate Oedipus’s enigmatic formula: ‘I suffered my deeds more than I acted them’. Most interpreters hold that Oedipus mistook his Tat for a Handlung and wrongly took responsibility for parricide and incest. I argue against the merely causal reading of Tat presupposed by this view that the tragic Tat also has an intentional structure. On the Restrictive Intentionalism about Action (RIA) which underlies Handlung, what counts as my action is only the realization of a conscious intention, accomplished with reasonable knowledge of the relevant circumstances and foreseeable consequences of realizing my intention. On RIA, Oedipus killed the charioteer and married Iocasta: parricide and incest happened to him. By contrast, on the Inclusive Intentionalism about Action (IIA) which underlies the tragic Tat, what counts as my action is everything I bring about in realizing a conscious intention, regardless of reasonable expectations about knowledge of the circumstances or foreseeable consequences of realizing my intention. On IIA, parricide and incest are part of the ‘whole compass’ of Oedipus’s deeds. I argue that Oedipus is right to take responsibility for his deeds and draw on Tony Honoré’s conception of ‘outcome responsibility’ to characterize the responsibility at stake as blameless liability. Where Oedipus errs is in taking ethical responsibility for his deeds. I show that in Oedipus at Colonus the older Oedipus reverses his position and holds, somewhat surprisingly, that he is innocent and ‘did nothing’. I argue that this reversal presupposes an implicit shift from IIA to RIA, and that this shift helps to finally make sense of Oedipus’s enigmatic formula: Oedipus suffered his deeds (on RIA) more than he acted them (on IIA). I conclude by widening the perspective beyond ancient Greece and engage with Bernard Williams’s interpretation of the same formula.

The grazing impact on epiphytic lichens by a non-native gastropod species is documented and quantified for the first time in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador using a unique combination of a multiple-choice feeding design with lichen transplant techniques under controlled laboratory conditions. The feeding experiment included three arboreal lichen species sewn onto a mesh and attached to red maple sticks inside a terrarium where four Cepaea nemoralis snails were introduced and allowed to graze over a five-day period. The three lichen species used in the feeding trials included the green-algal Platismatia glauca, the cephalolichen Lobaria pulmonaria, and the cyanolichen Lobarina scrobiculata. The trials also included two sets of L. pulmonaria from different regions of the island of Newfoundland. The levels of grazing and preference by the snails was very high. Herbivory was high for all lichen species but was highest for Platismatia glauca, for which 70% of thalli were consumed after only 24 hours. Our results show that C. nemoralis is probably affecting the distribution and abundance of epiphytic lichens in the forests of Newfoundland and Labrador. Furthermore, our observations of intense herbivory on reproductive structures challenges the universal application of the optimal defence theory in lichens.

Ensuring safety and security in urban air mobility is of utmost significance. As air traffic becomes more concentrated in urban regions, instances of flight conflicts are on the rise. The complex urban morphology, micro-environmental factors and various flight risks significantly impact flight safety. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework to address these challenges. The framework incorporates random 3D city layouts, encompassing city buildings and terrains to establish a corridor graph structure. Leveraging this graph, a multi-view representation learning approach is proposed, which employs graph neural networks, recurrent neural networks (RNN) and contrastive learning to effectively manage tactical conflicts. Through rigorous testing across diverse scenarios, including the incorporation of uncertainties such as wind turbulence, the model’s performance is extensively evaluated. The conclusive results underscore the robustness and efficacy of the proposed approach in ensuring safety and resolving conflicts within the dynamic urban air mobility landscape.

A tame dynamical system can be characterized by the cardinality of its enveloping (or Ellis) semigroup. Indeed, this cardinality is that of the power set of the continuum $2^{\mathfrak c}$ if the system is non-tame. The semigroup admits a minimal bilateral ideal and this ideal is a union of isomorphic copies of a group $\mathcal H$, called the structure group. For almost automorphic systems, the cardinality of $\mathcal H$ is at most ${\mathfrak c}$ that of the continuum. We show a partial converse of this which holds for minimal systems for which the Ellis semigroup of their maximal equicontinuous factor acts freely, namely that the cardinality of $\mathcal H$ is $2^{{\mathfrak c}}$ if the proximal relation is not transitive and the subgroup generated by products $\xi \zeta ^{-1}$ of singular points $\xi ,\zeta $ in the maximal equicontinuous factor is not open. This refines the above statement about non-tame Ellis semigroups, as it locates a particular algebraic component of the latter which has such a large cardinality.

The Hawkes process is a popular candidate for researchers to model phenomena that exhibit a self-exciting nature. The classical Hawkes process assumes the excitation kernel takes an exponential form, thus suggesting that the peak excitation effect of an event is immediate and the excitation effect decays towards 0 exponentially. While the assumption of an exponential kernel makes it convenient for studying the asymptotic properties of the Hawkes process, it can be restrictive and unrealistic for modelling purposes. A variation on the classical Hawkes process is proposed where the exponential assumption on the kernel is replaced by integrability and smoothness type conditions. However, it is substantially more difficult to conduct asymptotic analysis under this setup since the intensity process is non-Markovian when the excitation kernel is non-exponential, rendering techniques for studying the asymptotics of Markov processes inappropriate. By considering the Hawkes process with a general excitation kernel as a stationary Poisson cluster process, the intensity process is shown to be ergodic. Furthermore, a parametric setup is considered, under which, by utilising the recently established ergodic property of the intensity process, consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator is demonstrated.

With the rapid advancements in robotics and autonomous driving, SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) has become a crucial technology for real-time localization and map creation, seeing widespread application across various domains. However, SLAM’s performance in dynamic environments is often compromised due to the presence of moving objects, which can introduce errors and inconsistencies in localization and mapping. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a visual SLAM system that employs dynamic feature point rejection. The system leverages a lightweight YOLOv7 model for detecting dynamic objects and performing semantic segmentation. Additionally, it incorporates optical flow tracking and multiview geometry techniques to identify and eliminate dynamic feature points. This approach effectively mitigates the impact of dynamic objects on the SLAM process, while maintaining the integrity of static feature points, ultimately enhancing the system’s robustness and accuracy in dynamic environments. Finally, we evaluate our method on the TUM RGB-D dataset and in real-world scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces both the root mean square error (RMSE) and standard deviation (Std) compared to the ORB-SLAM2 algorithm.