Collaborative Sensor Networks

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Imagine a world with smart machines that can self-diagnose and repair, predict aging components and proactively alert factories for replacement parts before the machine breaks down. Smart roads will make travel safer and highways less congested by noting accidents, potholes, alternate routes and reporting the information to a car's global positioning system (GPS). Smart appliances, such as refrigerators, will understand families' dietary requirements or doctor's orders and take inventory of refrigerators to relay information to a shopping list on a personal digital assistant (PDA). Collaborative sensor networks will help realize this vision. Sensors are tiny devices capable of capturing physical information, such as heat, light or motion, about an environment. Rapid advances in technology have enabled a new generation of tiny, inexpensive, networked sensors. Embedding millions of sensors into an environment creates a digital skin or wireless network of sensors, each sensor capable of capturing physical information about its immediate space. These massively distributed sensor networks communicate with one another and summarize the immense amounts of low-level information to produce data representative of the overall environment. Collaborative, smart sensor networks present information in a qualitative, human-interpretable form, which allows people (or computers) to respond intelligently. Sensor networks will change the way we work and live. Currently, we have two projects running in this area: In the European project EYES, we develop the architecture and the technology needed for building self-organizing and collaborative sensor networks using reconfigurable smart sensor nodes, which are self-aware, self-reconfigurable and autonomous. This technology will enable the creation of a new generation of sensors, which can effectively network together so as to provide a flexible platform for the support of a large variety of mobile sensor network applications. CONSENSUS is a NWO funded research project in which the Universities of Twente and Delft cooperate in the field of sensor networks. The goal of the CONSENSUS project is to investigate and develop collaboration algorithms that enable the creation of a new generation of autonomous and self-organizing sensors that can effectively network together to provide enriched context information to ubiquitous computing applications used by (mobile) users.

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