I decided to post my thesis from years back, just in case there is any interest from anyone searching the internets looking for something that might be useful along those lines. It was a simulator for ” MilOWS ” – a complex real-time lidar for detecting obstacles like hanging wires, poles, walls, and so on for helicopters.
The paper is mostly about the theory behind a LIDAR designed to make sure helicopters don’t crash into stuff. It’s a bit different from the LIDARs that I worked on and designed (hardware and software-wise) over the last 18 years, but as it is quite different (real-time versus post-processing) it has some unique characteristics that make it stand out.
Of course, I’m talking about a complex LIDAR that had probably 100 people developing it versus our small team at NASA (and I was the only software guy related to the actual hardware that went into our LIDARS, for the most part).
The HTML version of my paper can be found here. There is also a PDF version right here. My presentation, which is probably a lot easier to digest, can be found right here in PDF format.
There is also an appendix that serves as a good code reference that describes the code here: Appendix B . I tried to convert it to HTML, but it was finicky and I gave up on it. The source code I have to track down still 🙂