WSN River Monitoring in São Paulo, Brazil

Capstone Paper in the Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society

2011-02-28T23:01:00.002-03:00

I am pleased to announced that a capstone journal paper describing our research will appear in the Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, published by Springer.

The full article is now available online at the following link:

http://www.springer.com/computer/journal/13173

Press Coverage of the REDE Project

2010-08-15T10:32:00.002-03:00

In recent weeks, our REDE project has been featured in a number of magazines and on a number of television shows. A selection of this coverage is included below:

Click on the following images in order to read full magazine articles on the REDE project:

Click on the following images to view television pieces on the REDE project:

Demonstration at SBRC'10

2010-04-10T04:16:00.004-03:00

We hope to demonstrate our approach to building environmental monitoring applications at the 28th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks and Distributed Systems (SBRC'10) in Gramado, Brazil.

If you would like to see our approach in action, you can download a cut-down version of our river monitoring application here.

The components: 'Theft', 'Conductivity' and 'Depth' should be deployed on your LooCI-enabled Sun SPOT sensor nodes, while the 'BackEnd' application should be run on the PC attached to your Sun SPOT gateway.

Full details on how to install the LooCI middleware and LooCI components can be found on our Google Code page.

Phase II of the REDE Project

2010-03-25T04:55:00.001-03:00

A REDE Mote Deployed on the Banks of a São Carlos Creek

There have not been many posts here over the last month as the initial phase of our project (based at the University of São Paulo, São Carlos) has come to an end. We are now continuing the work in this project as a remote collaboration between Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China and the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

We are currently submitting papers based upon this work to a number of journals and conferences. As these papers become available, details will be provided here.

Building WSN Software with LooCI and PMA

2010-02-16T16:20:00.000-02:00

I have mentioned the LooCI middleware (pronounced 'Lucy') a few times on this blog and I think its about time that I explained what LooCI is.

The Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure (LooCI) is a componet model for Wireless Sensor Networks. LooCI allows for the creation of generic units of software functionality, known as 'components' that communicate over an 'event bus'. By composing together generic components (e.g. a depth sensing component, a flow sensing component and a logging component), application developers can quickly develop applications (e.g. a flood monitoring application). Our own composition is a little more complex and is shown below.

The Flooding Application Composition

Another cool thing that LooCI offers is the Policy-based Management Architecture (PMA), which allows for the customisation of components after deployment using high level, human readable policies. For example, we use a generic vibration sensing component to detect tampering with the REDE motes, however, the trees on which we mount REDE motes also sway in the wind, giving a false signal, as shown in the trace data below, which shows movement accross three axis - X,Y and Z.

Accelerometer Data Generated by a Deployed REDE Mote

Using PMA Policies, we can quickly adapt our vibration component, so that false alerts are not generated due to movement caused by the wind. As these policies are simple and high level, they can be generated by our Environmental Science partners without assistance from us Computer Scientists. Furthermore, as they are compact, deploying a new policy doesn't consume much power.

First Prototype of the REDE Sensor Node

2010-02-14T15:38:00.000-02:00

Here's a photograph of the first prototyope of our river monitoring platform, which we are calling REDE. So far, REDE offers: depth, conductivity, temperature and tamper-detection.

New Sensors

2010-02-10T15:36:00.000-02:00

The hardware and software implementation is moving along nicely for our prototype deployment here in Sao Carlos. We have now integrated some specialized river monitoring sensors with our SPOT motes, such as the hydrostatic level sensor you can see below.

Integrating a Pressure Sensor with the Sun SPOT

We expect to deploy our first mote next week -- more information to come.

Seminar Slides

2010-02-03T11:00:00.003-02:00

Some audience members asked if we could provide our seminar slides here on the blog. You can access them by clicking on the link below:

[ CLICK TO DOWNLOAD SLIDES, [PDF, 12MB]

In case you didn't attend the original seminar and would like to know what this presentation is all about, I have included the abstract below:

Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are composed of embedded computers equipped with sensors, actuators and wireless networking facilities. In recent years, WSN have been applied to tackle a number of critical problems including: environmental monitoring, energy conservation and industrial automation. This seminar will discuss the author's previous work in providing support for WSN-based flood monitoring, along with experiences gained during the deployment of two previous WSN-based flood monitoring systems in the North West of England. The seminar will conclude with discussion of the author's current work in deploying a flood monitoring and warning system in the state of Sao Paulo.

Seminar Tour

2010-02-01T12:48:00.006-02:00

This week, Jo and I will visit four universities to present seminars on the river monitoring project and our related work. If you are at one of the institutions listed below, feel free to come along. Here is our schedule:

====================
Tuesday February 2nd at 14.00
Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)
Institute of Computing
Room: 85-IC2
--------------------
Wednesday February 3rd at 14.00
Universidade de São Paulo at São Carlos
Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science
ICMC Auditorium
--------------------
Thursday February 4th at at 14.00
Federal University of São Carlos at Sorocaba (UFSCar)
Room: TBC.
--------------------
Friday February 5th at 14:30
Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo (USP)
School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities
Room 12 I1
====================

As we'll be on the road, there probably won't be many blog updates next week.

Solar Power in Brazil's Rainy Season

2010-01-31T19:08:00.004-02:00

Low power operation is critical for Wireless Sensor Networks in order to maximize mote battery life (consider the problems of replacing batteries during a serious flood event).

To address this concern, we integrate a secondary battery and solar panels with our Sun SPOT motes. However, even in the tropical climate of São Paulo, solar power is limited during the rainy season, as can be seen from the graph below:

The graph shows how much power was produced by a small solar array deployed here in São Carlos from 9AM on Thursday, January 28th to 9AM on Sunday, January 31st during a period of heavy rain and dark clouds. In these conditions our solar array produced an average of 6mA over the entire period (including night-time) and a maximum of 47mA during the short periods of better weather.

We will continue these experiements over the next two weeks and use the results to inform the design of our flood monitoring application.

The Creeks of São Carlos

2010-01-30T12:44:00.003-02:00

Our first river monitoring deployment will be a small scale prototype consisting of just four motes, that installed on the creek network of São Carlos. Each mote will be equipped with pressure sensors to measure the water depth, temperature sensors and a variety of interesting pollution sensors (more on this later). A map of our prototype deployment is shown below:

Close up shots of each location follow:

Location T - A Tributary of The Creek

Location C1 - The Creek Before the Confluence

Location C2 - After the Confluence with the Tributary

Data from this kind of fine-grained sensing can be used to better understand the interplay between creeks, improve flood models and identify sources of pollution. We will be exploring this in partnership with Environmental Scientists from the Universidade de São Paulo.

Wireless Sensor Networks

2010-01-29T11:00:00.002-02:00

This post provdies a little background on Wireless Sensor Network technologies and how we can use these to support Environmental Monitoring.

Wireless Sensor Networks are composed of tiny embedded computers known as 'motes'. A mote will have an embedded CPU, low power wireless networking and simple sensors. Below you can see the the Sun SPOT mote, which we are using in this project:

A Sun SPOT Sensor Mote

The Sun SPOT is great for rapid prototyping of sensor network applications as it runs standard Java ME (like many cell phones) and offers plenty of computational resources. On the Sun SPOT we run our specially developed sensor network software - LooCI (pronounced 'Lucy). I will post more about this on another occasion.

After integrating the Sun SPOTs with solar panels, batteries, depth and pollution sensors (some of which can be seen below), they whole thing will be mounted in a weather-proof case and deployed on the São Carlos creeks.

Equipment Ready for Use

Once we have finished building the sensor motes, they will probably look a little something like the photo below, which shows our previous sensor network deployment on the River Ribble in North West England:

Our Prevous Deployment on the River Ribble

You can read more about our previous work in these pieces by the New Scientist and Wired Magazine.

Flood Monitoring in São Paulo State

2010-01-28T15:31:00.009-02:00

Welcome to our project blog! Over the next month, we will deploy a Wireless Sensor Network to measure water depth and pollution levels in the network of creeks that runs through São Carlos in southern Brazil.

Specifically, we will investigate how new software and hardware technologies can be used to (1) improve flood warning accuracy, (2) support the creation of better environmental models and (3) inform effective response to flood events.

Based upon the lessons learned from our prototype deployment, we will investigate a larger scale deployment on the Tietê River which runs through São Paulo City. This could not be more timely, given the flash floods that continue to affect São Paulo.

BBC News coverage of the current floods in São Paulo.