485335
NIMS-AQ: A novel system for autonomous sensing of aquatic environments
As concern for water resource availability increases, so does the need for intelligent aquatic sensing applications. The requirements, and complexity of such applications has also increased due to demands for: 1) broad spatial coverage and high spatial resolution monitoring, 2) capability for resolving fine scale spatiotemporal dynamics and 3) the need for rapid system deployment with semi-autonomous operation. With these criteria in mind, we present the Aquatic Networked InfoMechanical System (NIMS-AQ). NIMS-AQ was developed based on experience gained from engineering research and collaboration with aquatic scientists and environmental engineers during several in-field measurement campaigns [1], [2], [3]. In this paper we demonstrate the effectiveness of NIMS- AQ through two experimental sensing campaigns encompassing both river and lake environments. Each campaign is centered around critical water resource monitoring objectives such as temperature, flow and contaminant levels. Experimental results for autonomous depth profiling using a submersible sonar system as well as adaptive sampling algorithms guided by phenomena models are presented herein. The found results conform with our objectives for rapid and systematic operation. Preliminary studies also indicate the systems viability for use with an autonomous iterative experiment design for environmental applications (A-IDEA) methodology that is currently under development. The IDEA methodology [1] provides effective characterization of spatiotemporal dynamics in aquatic environments. A-IDEA, as it is to be implemented on the NIMS-AQ platform, is also described.
14256533
Autonomous Robotic Sensing Experiments at San Joaquin River
Distributed, high-density spatiotemporal observations are proposed for answering many river related questions, including those pertaining to hydraulics and multi-dimensional river modeling, geomorphology, sediment transport and riparian habitat restoration. In spite of the recent advancements in technology, currently available systems have many constraints that preclude long term, remote, autonomous, high resolution monitoring in the real environment. We present here a case study of an autonomous, high resolution robotic spatial mapping of cross-sectional velocity and salt concentration in a river basin. The scientific objective of this investigation was to characterize the transport and mixing phenomena at the confluence of two distinctly different river streams - San Joaquin River and its tributary Merced River. Several experiments for analyzing the spatial and temporal trends at multiple cross-sections of the San Joaquin River were performed during the campaign from August 21-25, 2006. These include deterministic dense raster scans and in-field adapted experimental design. Preliminary analysis from these experiments illustrating the range of investigations is presented with the focus on adaptive experiments that enable sparse sampling to provide larger spatial coverage without discounting the dynamics in the phenomena. Lessons learned during the campaign are discussed to provide useful insights for similar robotic investigations in aquatic environments.
14857728
Human assisted robotic team campaigns for aquatic monitoring
Large-scale environmental sensing, e.g., understanding microbial processes in an aquatic ecosystem, requires coordination across a multidisciplinary team of experts working closely with a robotic sensing and sampling system. We describe a human-robot team that conducted an aquatic sampling campaign in Lake Fulmor, San Jacinto Mountains Reserve, California during three consecutive site visits (May 9–11, June 19–22, and August 28–31, 2006). The goal of the campaign was to study the behavior of phytoplankton in the lake and their relationship to the underlying physical, chemical, and biological parameters. Phytoplankton form the largest source of oxygen and the foundation of the food web in most aquatic ecosystems. The reported campaign consisted of three system deployments spanning four months. The robotic system consisted of two subsystems—NAMOS (networked aquatic microbial observing systems) comprised of a robotic boat and static buoys, and NIMS-RD (rapidly deployable networked infomechanical systems) comprised of an infrastructure-supported tethered robotic system capable of high-resolution sampling in a two-dimensional cross section (vertical plane) of the lake. The multidisciplinary human team consisted of 25 investigators from robotics, computer science, engineering, biology, and statistics.We describe the lake profiling campaign requirements, the robotic systems assisted by a human team to perform high fidelity sampling, and the sensing devices used during the campaign to observe several environmental parameters. We discuss measures taken to ensure system robustness and quality of the collected data. Finally, we present an analysis of the data collected by iteratively adapting our experiment design to the observations in the sampled environment. We conclude with the plans for future deployments.
2744750
Mobile Robot Sensing for Environmental Applications
This paper reports the first application of iterative experimental design methodology for high spatiotemporal resolution characterization of river and lake aquatic systems performed using mobile robot sensing systems. Both applications involve dynamic phenomena spread over large spatial domain: 1) Characterization of contaminant concentration and flow at the confluence of two major rivers displaying dynamics due to flow of the water; and 2) Characterization of rapidly evolving biological processes such as phytoplankton dynamics in a lake system. We describe the development and application of a new general purpose method for mobile robot sensing in such environments - Iterative experiment Design for Environmental Applications (IDEA). IDEA introduces in-field adaptation of mobile robotic sensing system. Analysis of the complex spatial and temporal structures associated with each observed environment is presented. Detailed characterization of the observed environment using IDEA methodology is used as an informed prior to improve the performance of the existing adaptive experimental design approaches for mobile robotic systems - stratified adaptive sampling and hierarchical non-stationary Gaussian Processes.
34506295
The low power energy aware processing (LEAP)embedded networked sensor system
13977499
Energy based path planning for a novel cabled robotic system
Cabled robotic systems have been used for a diverse set of applications such as environmental sensing, search and rescue, sports and entertainment and air vehicle simulators. In this paper, we introduce a new cabled robot- Networked Info Mechanical System for Planar actuation (NIMS-PL), with energy profiling capabilities. Accurate energy measurements supported by NIMS-PL enable path planning that optimizes the robotpsilas path subject to an upper bound on energy consumption. We performed extensive empirical validation of the optimized path planning approach in simulation using an environmental sensing application as an example. We also validated the simulation results using NIMS-PL, demonstrating significant improvements in the sensing task when accounting with accurate energy measurements as opposed to Euclidean distance, which is typically used for modeling energy spent in path traversal.
17257241
SoC synthesis with automatic hardware-software interface generation
Design of efficient system-on-chips (SoCs) requires thorough application analysis to identify various compute intensive parts. These compute intensive parts can be mapped to hardware in order to meet the cost as well as the performance constraints. However, faster time to market requires automation of synthesis of these code segments of the application from high level specification such as C along with its interfaces. Such a synthesis system should be able to generate hardware which is easily pluggable in various types of architectures, as well as augment the application code to automatically take advantage of this new hardware component. In this paper, we address this problem and present an approach for complete SoC synthesis. We automatically generate synthesizable VHDL for the compute intensive part of the application along with necessary interfaces. Our approach is generic in the sense that it supports various processors and buses by keeping a generic hardware interface on one end and a dedicated one on the other. The generated hardware can be used in a tightly or loosely coupled manner in terms of memory and register communication. We present the effectiveness of this approach for some commonly used image processing spatial filter applications.