Dead reckoning

Etienne, A. S. (1992). Navigation of a small mammal by dead reckoning and local cues. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1, 48-52. 

Etienne, A. S., Berlie, J., Georgakopoulos, J., and Maurer, R. (1998). Role of dead reckoning in navigation. In S. Healy (ed.), Spatial representation in animals (pp. 54-68). New York Oxford University Press. 

An alternative to feedback control is open-loop control, where there is no loop. System output is determined by dead reckoning and there is no means to correct the output should there be an error. Open-loop control is faster, and requires less effort, than feedback control. Open-loop control woiks well for repetitive situations where there is small likelihood that an error will occnr. An example of this is the signals sent to the leg muscles for walking on flat terrain. Only when the ground becomes rough or sloped is feedback normally required. 

Studdert, D. M., Brennan, T. A., and Thomas, E. J. Beyond Dead Reckoning Measures of Medical Injury Burden, Malpractice Dtigation, and Alternative Compensation Models from Utah and Colorado. Indiana Law Redew, 2000,55(4), 1643-1686. 

From Sunday to Monday, the i8th of April, with the same wind, we made 18 leagues, by dead reckoning for this day was cloudy and we could not take the sun. Here we verified what we had noticed several times before respecting the quality of the wind from the Antarctic Pole, that is, from the south and S.W. or S.E., that it is cold and dry, with a clear sky and a bright sun, and that rain ceases. 

No cooperative localization was performed in the first trial because the exteroceptive sensors of the robots had been switched off and robots performed only dead reckoning to localize themselves. The upper curve in Figure 2 shows an error, which in 2000 steps reaches 2 meters. In Figure 4, the curve related to this simulation is the larger of the two. 

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