Smartskin

Densely Instrumented Physical Infrastructures

	FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-020312 PTDC/EEA-ELC/121753/2010 3 years (Mar 2012 to Feb 2015)
Summary:	Although the information technology transformation of the 20th century appeared revolutionary, a bigger change is on the horizon. The term Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has come to describe the research and technological effort that will ultimately allow the interlinking of the real-world physical objects and the cyberspace efficiently. The integration of physical processes and computing is not new. Embedded systems have been in place for a long time and these systems often combine physical processes with computing. The revolution will come from massively networked embedded computing devices, which will allow instrumenting the physical world with pervasive networks of sensor-rich embedded computation. As Moore's law continues, the cost of a single embedded computer equipped with sensing, processing and communication capabilities drops toward zero. This makes it economically feasible to densely deploy networks of very large quantities of such nodes to take a very large number of sensor readings from the physical world and compute quantities and take decisions out of those sensor readings or computed quantities. Very dense networks offer a better resolution of the physical world and therefore a better capability of detecting the occurrence of an event; and this is of paramount importance for a number of foreseeable applications. Structural health monitoring (SHM) of physical infrastructures (bridges, aircrafts, etc.) is an example of applications where measurements at fine spatial scales are required. Other more or less futuristic CPS applications can however be mentioned. Take the example of the ongoing efforts within the aircraft industry to respond to environmental concerns by developing technologies that will allow sustained air travel growth whilst minimizing overall carbon footprint. Active flow control, achieved through local modulation of aircraft skin surfaces, is such of one, yet to be seen, technological developments with the potential to offer significant reduction of drag and related fuel consumption and emissions. However, implementing such an active flow control system requires thousands of sensor/controller/actuator systems to be embedded across the aircraft wings and fuselage to create an active aircraft. This example opens our minds to a plethora of other more or less futuristic applications of smart skins / structures to other physical objects ranging from cars (think about controlling safety devices upon an impact by using a high-resolution sensing of the way the vehicle structures are deforming) to bridges or buildings (think about an active skin that adapts to atmospheric conditions or other external factors to save energy, reduce vibrations, react to earth quakes, reduce aging, etc.). Currently available approaches for data processing in such large-scale dense deployments lead to energy-waste and long response-times from sensing to actuation. This project will rectify that. We want to develop techniques and technologies that allow performing scalable and efficient data processing in large-scale dense cyber-physical systems. This is yet an unsolved problem. The major novelty of this proposal is effectively in the co-design of distributed algorithms for sensor data processing and underlying networked distributed computing systems with corresponding resource management schemes such that the utilization of resources is low.
Funding:	Global: 141KEUR, CISTER: 141KEUR
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Contact Person at CISTER:	Eduardo Tovar

20, Oct, 2017

Portuguese Aeronautics, Space and Defence Cluster visits CISTER

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Thesis

Efficient Aggregate Computations in Large-Scale Dense Wireless Sensor Networks HURRAY-TR-100905
Nuno Pereira

Smartskin

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Portuguese Aeronautics, Space and Defence Cluster visits CISTER

Smartskin