Comic books and superhero films are often regarded as mere fiction, but oftentimes these mediums are used within the classroom in order to understand complicated topics in history such as war. But, this thesis looks at expanding this viewpoint to look at how comic books and their coinciding films, specifically Marvel's X-Men and Civil War, act as allegories to real world politics and social justice issues. This thesis examines the importance of the allegories found within comic books and their accompanying films, and how the allegories found in these works of literature and film are relevant in today's changing world. Specifically, this thesis will look towards explaining global politics found within these sources through its examination of social justice issues and international politics, and what this teaches us about our past, present, and even the future political realm.
Superman has been a cultural figure in America for 85 years- blasting out from the comic book page and into our collective consciousness. Yet, does the character still hold relevancy? Do people care about Superman, and know why he is important to our country? To understand where he stands now as a cultural figure, Superman's reciprocal history with America is defined, and with that definition comes highs and lows for the character that ultimately solidify his place as an aspirational figure of hope today.
for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
Towards enabling a UAV to autonomously sense and avoid moving obstacles, this thesis makes the following contributions. Initially, an image-based reactive motion planner is developed for a quadrotor to avoid a fast approaching obstacle. Furthermore, A Dubin’s curve based geometry method is developed as a global path planner for a fixed-wing UAV to avoid collisions with aircraft. The image-based method is unable to produce an optimal path and the geometry method uses a simplified UAV model. To compensate
these two disadvantages, a series of algorithms built upon the Closed-Loop Rapid Exploratory Random Tree are developed as global path planners to generate collision avoidance paths in real time. The algorithms are validated in Software-In-the-Loop (SITL) and Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulations using a fixed-wing UAV model and in real flight experiments using quadrotors. It is observed that the algorithm enables a UAV to avoid moving obstacles approaching to it with different directions and speeds.