Computer science students working with Professor Gul Agha are working with students and faculty in Civil and Environmental Engineering to study a new approach to civil infrastructure monitoring.
The goal of the project is to develop scalable and robust algorithms for structural health monitoring (SHM) over a wireless smart sensor network. The ability to continuously monitor the integrity of civil infrastructure in real time could lead to a reduction in maintenance and inspection costs, while providing increased safety to the public.
According to the research team, the work is of particular importance because limited resources on sensor nodes preclude the direct application of traditional monitoring strategies in smart sensor networks. The group's approach uses concurrent and distributed real-time processing to make dense arrays of low-cost wireless sensors a viable and more effective approach to the SHM problem.
PhD student Kirill Mechitov has been working on the wireless sensor network that supports the research for several years. Using the Intel Imote2 sensor platform, Mechitov and his colleagues have developed a sensing platform that not only is more effective at detecting and processing vibrations of the structure, but also provides a low cost and robust framework for future SHM application development.
Already, the project has released an open source toolkit containing a library of services for, and examples of, SHM applications. The group is now testing their system at full-scale, using the wireless sensor network they developed in the lab to monitor the state of a local pedestrian bridge.
If the full-scale test is successful, the group will have developed a first of its kind autonomous sensor network system for monitoring civil infrastructure, and will bring us one step closer to a safer, lower cost mechanism to keep tabs on the overall health of the nation's estimated $20 trillion civil infrastructure.