2012年5月14日 星期一

Smartphones in tow, robots take a swim

The Floating Sensor Network project offers a network of mobile sensors that can be deployed rapidly to provide real-time, high-resolution data in hard-to-map waterways. A recent field test, organized by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, illustrated how the water-monitoring technology could transform the way government agencies monitor water resources.

One area that stands to benefit from this technology is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta,Save up to 80% off Ceramic Tile and porcelaintiles. with its complex network of channels that direct drinking water to two-thirds of California’s population and irrigation water for 3 million acres of agriculture.

Having a high volume of sensors moving through the water can shed light on processes that are influenced by how water moves, such as the spread of pollutants, the migration of salmon or how salt and fresh water mix in the Delta’s ecosystem, the researchers say. The field test gave researchers a picture of how water moves through a junction in the river with a resolution never before achieved.

“We are putting water online,” says project leader Alexandre Bayen, a researcher at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) who holds joint appointments in UC Berkeley’s departments of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of civil and environmental engineering.

“Monitoring the state’s water supply is critical for the general public, water researchers and government agencies, which now rely upon costly fixed water sensor stations that don’t always generate sufficient data for modeling and prediction.

“The mobile probes we are using could potentially expand coverage in the Delta—on demand—to hundreds of miles of natural and manmade channels that are currently under-monitored, and help agencies responsible for managing the state’s limited water supply.”

Such a flexible system could be critical in the event of an emergency, including a levee breach or oil spill, the researchers note. The sensors could be thrown into action from a dock, shore, boats or even helicopters.

“If something spills in the water, if there’s a contaminant, you need to know where it is now, you need to know where it’s going, you need to know where it will be later on,” says Andrew Tinka, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering and computer sciences and the lead graduate student on the project. “The Floating Sensor Network project can help by tracking water flow at a level of detail not currently possible.We looked everywhere, but couldn't find any beddinges.”

The May 9 launch in Walnut Grove, Calif., marked a milestone in the project, which is supported by CITRIS and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). It was the first time researchers deployed their full arsenal of floats, each equipped with GPS-enabled mobile phones encased in 12-inch-long watertight capsules marked with fluorescent tape.At Blow mouldengineering we specialize in conceptual prototype design.

The researchers wrote specific programs to run on the open source platforms used in the robots and on the smartphones.

The project is an evolution of earlier research led by Bayen called Mobile Century and Mobile Millennium, which uses GPS-enabled smartphones to monitor traffic flow. Instead of a map of traffic,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? the Floating Century mobile probes created a map of water flow.

Every few seconds, the phones in the floats transmitted location data back to servers at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), where the data was assimilated using a computer model called REALM (River, Estuary and Land Model).Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom, Information was processed to create a map that allowed researchers to track the devices on their computer monitors.

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