Communications of the ACM
Wireless Smart Sensors Inspect Bridge
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the University of Tokyo have developed and deployed a network of wireless smart sensors on a bridge in South Korea to monitor its structural health.
Dubbed the Illinois Structural Health Monitoring Project, the sensor network was designed to create a reliable alternative to traditional structure inspection techniques, which can be expensive and unreliable. The researchers' technology uses concurrent and distributed real-time processing to solve the issues of cost effectiveness and safety, which are problematic with traditional centralized approaches.
"Our research in distributed structural health monitoring using wireless sensor networks overcomes these problems and promises a robust, significantly lower-cost safer alternative to traditional structure inspection techniques," says UIUC professor Gul Agha.
The research also produced a customizable software framework, which makes the development of structural health monitoring applications easier. More than 40 institutions around the world are using the framework of sensors and software, says UIUC professor Bill Spencer.
From Futurity.org
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2009 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA 
No entries found