Abstract

Background/Question/Methods We present a new system that provides a flexible, vendor neutral, embedded cyber infrastructure for environmental sensing. This technology, which has been fielded in a dozen deployments worldwide, enables rapid integration of multiple sensors, data acquisition units, autonomic programmable sensor to sensor triggering, QA/QC, multiple data communication protocols (including satellite, WiFi, long-range radios, cable modem etc.) and several web based Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) data analysis interfaces including a Google Cloud application. This technology transforms many aspects of field science through its programmable low power embedded processor in the field which not only provides the capabilities described above, but through additional R&D has the potential to provide a rich environment for automatic metadata tagging, data repository submission, and data sharing. This work is part of a continuing series of embedded cyber infrastructure efforts under the umbrella of the SPAN project at The University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.
Results/Conclusions SPAN is designed to be turnkey and easy to use by scientists. It provides a sensor integration framework that includes support for a variety of traditional and emerging sensors such as microphones, webcams, and robotic cameras. Many of the benefits of the system are achieved through the use of a powerful, low-cost, low-power generic embedded processor close to the sensors in the field. The use of multiple communication technologies provide real-time data access to scientists in the laboratory and enable two-way …

Date

2010

Authors

Fabio Silva, Sridhar Gullapalli, Young Cho, Jui-Hung Chang, Philip W Rundel, Terry Benzel

Journal

The 95th ESA Annual Meeting