Monitoring Natural and Built Environments Using Unmanned Aerial Systems for DRR

NOTE: This is Part 2 of the article by Dr. Lawrence Materum (ECE Dept., DLSU)

 

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are communication systems that could provide preventive, resilient, and adaptive mechanisms for enabling data transfer in pre-, during, and post- disaster scenarios. Long-range, low-power, and sufficient nodes are important requirements for deploying wireless sensor networks in infrastructure monitoring, disaster risk reduction scenarios, and the like. What if one of the component of the WSN fails or destroyed during a disaster, say the collector?  In case of the failure of a data collector, unmanned aerial systems could serve as a target node collector, or as a relay.

 

As far as the author knows, none of the existing WSN technologies (even M2M or IoT standards) has addressed this.  Potential solutions are as follows: (1) collector redundancy, (2) collector must be placed in a secure location, and (3) collector should be easily rolled out (plug-and-play). 

If the collector should be easily rolled out, a self-deploying collector if redundancy fails is one way to achieve this solution.  Another one, though it could be related to a self-deploying collector is by using unmanned aerial systems (UAS).  A UAS could be autonomous or remotely controlled.  A UAS is also referred to as unmanned aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), drone, remote operated aircraft (ROA), high-altitude platform (HAP), low-altitude platform (LAP), remote-controlled airship, or satellites (especially microsatellites and nanosatellites).  Now, there is a hot race in research, patents, standardization, and policy implementation for this topic. One example of the use of UAS is portrayed in bridge safety.  UAS could serve as a target node collector. This means it only will serve a subset of sensor nodes at a time.  Such UAS may have a large coverage depending on antenna and transmit power. Another way to use UAS is by using it as a relay station, assuming that the collector has a reduced range capability.

Research Challenges:
 
1. If a fraction of the nodes are broken during a disaster, what node data sampling process would lead to an accurate assessment of the desired mechanisms for the ff:? 

a.     Prevention of disaster risks

b.     Recovery from disasters

c.     Adaptation to different disaster scenarios

2.     What data transmission protocol could produce the least lag from UAS relay to (1) the collector, or to (2) other UAS relays?

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