ICRA 2007 Tutorial

Model-Based Exploitation of Sensor Networks

 


 

Organizers:

 

Eddie Grant (North Carolina State University, USA)

http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/dept/directory/egrant

 

Frans Groen, Gregor Pavlin (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

http://www.science.uva.nl/research/ias/people/f.c.a.groen/
http://www.decis.nl/content/view/39/18/

 

Uwe Hanebeck (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)

http://isas.uka.de/site_en/people/hanebeck/hanebeck.html

 

Thomas C. Henderson (University of Utah, USA)

www.cs.utah.edu/~tch

 

Art Sanderson (Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)

http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/homepages/acs/

 


 

              Scope of the Tutorial

 

Recently researchers have begun examining how to best exploit strong models in order to better utilize sensor networks; these models may be either of the environment being sensed, or of the sensor network itself.  The models are developed in such a way as to provide solution techniques otherwise difficult or not possible, to improve the accuracy or efficiency of the solution, or to provide a framework in which uncertainly can be explicitly characterized and manipulated.

 

The goals of this tutorial include:

 

·        Survey state-of-the-art in this area by researchers active in the area and representing a diversity of approaches.

·        Provide a statement of the core intellectual challenges in this area.

·        Consider which applications may best benefit from this approach.

·        Determine what benchmarks and datasets may be useful and made publicly available for the research community.

 

Technical Content

 

In addition to a brief introduction to sensor networks prepared mainly as a handout, we propose to cover the following areas from our own research activities:

 

·        (Grant) Acoustic models and the embedding of sensor networks in fabric.

·        (Groen) Bayesian inference models for sensor networks.

·        (Hanebeck) Probabilistic and statistical methods in sensor networks.

·        (Henderson) Exploitation of PDE models of physical phenomena in computational sensor networks.

·        (Sanderson) Model exploitation in sensor networks and underwater robot coastal water monitoring and model-based adaptive sampling.

 

Our goal is to do this in such a way that novices and experts will benefit.

 

Relevance

 

Much work has been done in sensor network devices, and operating systems as well as some basic information processing areas (data aggregation, gradient calculation, etc.).  The topic of higher-level model based exploitation of sensor networks is an exciting new research area and a timely topic for the robotics and automation community.