Integrating Motion into Infrastructure Using Cell Phones

Integrating Motion into Infrastructure using Cell Phones
Alexandre Bayen [Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley]
Abstract:

The control and optimization of cyberphysical infrastructure systems presupposes the knowledge of constitutive principles of such ("physical") systems, and a good understanding of ("cyber") information flow underlying their behavior. A possible meaning of cyber is thus "virtual" or "computer related", while physical relates to system features governed by a physical process. A possible definition for cyberphysical network is thus a network which is governed at the same time by constitutive equations (conservation laws, laws of physics, etc.), and information theory (communication, sensing).

While most of the sensing in large scale infrastructure systems is mostly static, the advances in miniaturization of sensors, the progress in robotics platforms and the convergence of communication and multi-media platforms (iPhone, Android, Nokia N95) have enabled a key new component to automation and monitoring: mobility.

We illustrate the integration of mobility into cyberphysical systems, in particular on the mathematical aspects of information gathering through communication (data assimilation, inverse modeling, and estimation) and their implication on privacy and security with two examples.

1) The Mobile Century and Mobile Millennium projects. With the emergence of GPS equipped cellular phones, the possibility of gathering large amounts of data on highways and freeways at low cost is opening a new era of mobile traffic sensing technologies. In collaboration with Nokia, Caltrans, and the California Center for Innovative Transportation, we are interested in obtaining position and velocity measurements of vehicles using on-board cellular phones equipped with GPS. This technology will penetrate the cellular phone market in an even more prevalent manner in the coming years. Our scientific interest is to find out how the incorporation of mobile sensing can add value to already existing monitoring infrastructures, and add information to areas which are currently unmonitored.

2) The Lagrangian Sensor project develops floating sensor packages for deployment in river and estuarine environments. As the sensor drifts through the water, it can gather data about the river flow and various environmental factors (salt concentration, particulate contamination, etc). Because the sensor moves with the water stream, the data it gathers offers a different perspective on the system that is more useful for some applications than traditional stationary sensing. The project also develops the data processing algorithms that are needed to incorporate this "moving" data into a global view of the system.