Much work on the archaeology of nautical mobility across the Mediterranean Sea draws on calculations of land visibility that were formulated in 1901 and that have received relatively little critical evaluation. Here, the authors trace the use of this map in archaeology, providing a critique of 2D coastal visibility analyses and presenting a new analysis to quantify coastal visibility in angular terms. The resulting multidimensional visibility datasets (available as online supplementary material) form the basis for an updated coastal visibility map for the Mediterranean Sea, offering a platform for the exploration of more nuanced questions about seafaring and navigation.

This study presents a bespoke hardware platform for indoor navigation, featuring a quadrotor equipped with an FZ3 card incorporating the AMD (formerly Xilinx) Zynq UltraScale+ ZU3EG MPSoC as the onboard computer. A core component of this platform is a field programmable gate array (FPGA) module specifically designed to efficiently compute Delaunay triangulations, enabling enhanced spatial awareness and real-time surface reconstruction. The onboard computer communicates with the flight controller, inertial measurement unit (IMU), ultra-wideband (UWB) localisation system, stereo camera, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and ultrasonic sensors via robotic operating system (ROS) 2. The primary objective is to develop a cost-effective, modular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system that can be adapted for a range of indoor navigation applications. The modular design supports different onboard computer platforms and sensor configurations, allowing researchers to easily customise the system for various experiments. By providing a practical framework for precise indoor navigation, this platform addresses the limitations of simulated, simplified laboratory setups, accelerating prototyping and supporting the deployment of UAVs in complex real-world environments. This work explores the UAV’s hardware architecture, the implementation of the Delaunay triangulation core on the FPGA system-on-chip (SoC), the ROS 2-based communication system and includes a detailed mass analysis and power estimation.

This article offers a detailed analysis of a Kachchhi-Gujarati manuscript chart of the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden dating probably from the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries and held at the Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers in London (mr Asia S.4.). The origins and possible dating of the manuscript are examined. Astronomical data inscribed on the chart, establishing latitude and providing sailing directions, are identified, interpreted, and projected. Its Devanagari toponyms are transcribed and identified with real-world locations. Coastal profiles and unnamed features representing significant navigational landmarks are individuated. Islamic buildings depicted on the chart are identified as specific regional mosque-shrines. The presence of Ottoman and other regional polities are inferred. The place of the chart within an early modern tradition of western-Indian navigational manuscripts and a wider Indian Ocean tradition is explored. Our analysis establishes the chart as a detailed and highly practical navigational work—countering earlier scholarly denigrations of its accuracy. In contrast, we show it to be one of the most detailed surviving indigenous navigational charts produced in an Indian Ocean tradition.

Maritime safety faces growing challenges due to an expanding global fleet, tighter schedules, and increasingly complex stakeholder interactions. This study integrates multiple data sources to determine a more accurate representation of major marine accident causative factors in the United Kingdom. Logistic regression and data modelling are applied to Automatic Identification System data (2011–2017) and reported accidents from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (2013–2019). Results show that larger vessels, daytime transits, service ships, winter conditions, and confined high-density areas such as ports impact accident likelihood. Interviews validate the data and emphasize the influence of port geometry and channel complexity. Among major UK ports, London, Plymouth and Milford Haven exhibit the highest accident-to-traffic densities. While maritime regulations and safety management systems in ports and vessels are seen as adequate by industry professionals, human factors require the greatest attention to improve maritime safety.

Informative path planning (IPP) is one of key applications for unmanned aerial vehicles. It can be applied to terrain monitoring problems, which are to find the static targets from bird’s eye view. In this research, the proposed algorithm generates the cost-benefit spanning tree (CBST) to boost the IPP performance. The CBST is able to generate different tree structures based on different parameters. The proofs show that the theoretical guarantees depend on the tree structures (e.g., minimal spanning tree and shortest path tree). The simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the benchmark approaches.

In basic neuropsychopharmacological research, some biobehavioural phenomena — e.g., population migration and navigation over long distances — are rarely considered because the most commonly used laboratory animals show little or no evidence of these phenomena. Nevertheless, they can be also relevant for the mechanism of human psychic aberrations. An annual migration is seen in migratory birds, certain marine mammals and several ungulates. For migratory birds, the time of departure is determined by the length of the photoperiod and is much less changeable than the chosen route. When navigating, migratory birds also use the direction and strength of the field lines of the Earth’s magnetic field. Because humans also seem to exhibit a certain sensitivity to the Earth’s magnetic field, the regulation in birds could also provide hints for research on human well-being. Some bird species have such highly developed cognitive abilities that this is considered proof of the possession of consciousness. Therefore, some birds may be suitable as experimental animals in neurobiological models for cognitive functions and for making the world of thought accessible. The dorsal diencephalic conduction system (DDCS) in humans is difficult to study due to its small size and complex architecture, but it is relatively well developed in more primitive vertebrates. For research into the primary interactions between the DDCS and the rest of the brain, the lamprey can be used as laboratory animal. There is manifold evidence that the DDCS along with forebrain and upper brainstem is of functional relevance and the significance of the DDCS in cortical-controlled networks could then be investigated in birds and verified in humans.

The path navigation of robot in an entirely known space is presented by various researchers in the recent times. The navigational complexity arises when a robot moves in a completely unknown and complex environment from one defined start to a designated desired location. As the success of the nature-inspired algorithms in the unclear navigational problem is better, therefore, an improved butterfly optimization algorithm (IBOA) to determine the optimal feasible path for a humanoid robot navigating through a platform cluttered with both known and unfamiliar barriers is presented in this study. The BOA is inspired by the food-gathering habits of butterflies, where the sense of smell is the vital parameter in the global optimal search. However, the performance of this technique in the complex environment is poor, as a result, the chances of being trapped in local minima are more. Hence, the BOA is improved by using a nonlinear weight reduction strategy in updating the position of the butterflies in every iteration. The simulation is carried out in the Webots platform by considering variable-legged robot, NAO, in an unfamiliar environment. The outcomes derived from the simulation and real assessments demonstrate the potential of the proposed technique and compare with other existing algorithms, which highlights the potential and efficacy of the proposed IBOA algorithm.

Terrain-aided navigation with a three-dimensional (3D) map has both high accuracy and high reliability, which is crucial for applications in the global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-denied scenarios. In this paper, a new terrain matching algorithm with 3D Zernike moments (3D ZMs) is proposed. The redundant items in the even-order 3D ZMs are analysed in theory. The 3D ZMs are also correlated with the standard deviations of terrain further to identify the redundant items. The new 3D ZM descriptors are proposed for the feature vector of the matching algorithm by excluding the redundant items from the descriptors. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm with the revised descriptors achieves a higher matching success rate than both that with the existing descriptors and that with the odd-order descriptors under the same conditions.

This article deals with Hecataeus of Miletus fr. 310 Jacoby, featuring a curious list of islands located along the Nile, and bearing Greek names such as Ephesus, Chios, Lesbos, Kypros and Samos. Scholars generally assume the list, composed in the late sixth or early fifth century, represents joint Greek emporia established on Egyptian soil, thereby serving as a reliable testimony to the emergence of collective Greek identities during the late Archaic period. The composition of the list, along with the contemporary historical, cultural and archaeological contexts of its place names, is examined with particular emphasis on the collective identities of the islanders. On this basis, it is contended that the list lacks any evidence pertaining to Greek commercial footholds or collective identities in Egypt. Rather, fr. 310 serves as a practical navigational mnemonic, delineating culturally familiar geographical landmarks to assist Greek sailors in traversing a complex foreign river passage. The fragment now emerges as a valuable historical document, illuminating Greek navigational knowledge and practices during the late Archaic period.

This paper studies the probability of active navigational error events for use in ship–bridge allision risk analysis. To estimate the probability of these kinds of events, accident databases, incident reports and AIS data were studied; the case studies herein cover 6 years and 15 bridges in Scandinavia. The main findings of this paper show that there is great variation in the probability of ship–bridge allision due to active navigational errors, and it is not recommended to use the currently common practice of 2% uniform distribution of the number of ship passages on all bridges. Another important finding is that the probability of a ship striking a bridge due to the error type Wrong Course at a Turning point is not uniform along the length of the bridge, but is only likely to occur in a cone formation from the last turning point.