Principal Investigator Oral Buyukozturk
Co-investigators Hao Sun , Kunal Kupwade Patil , Robert W Haupt , Robert Shin , Huseyin Sadi Kuleli , Thomas Herring , M Toksöz , Ju Li , John Fisher , Fredo Durand , William Freeman , Christoph Reinhart , John Ochsendorf , Markus Buehler , Sidney Yip
Wireless sensor networks promise to deliver low cost, low power and massively distributed systems for structural health monitoring. These networks are comprised of many individual ‘nodes’, which each have sensing, computational and communication ability, and are battery powered. A key component of these systems, particularly when sampling rates are high, is the capability to process data within the network. This capability allows sensor data streams to be condensed at the sensor node level before wireless communication, often dramatically reducing the power used, and therefore extending the battery life of individual nodes in the network. Although progress has been made towards this vision, it remains a difficult task to develop and program ’smart’ wireless sensing applications. We are developing a system which allows data acquisition and computational tasks to be specified in Python, a high level programming language, and executed within the sensor network. Key features of this system include the ability to execute custom application code without firmware updates, to run multiple users’ requests concurrently and to conserve power through adjustable sleep settings.