With the recent advances in sensors, robotics, communication, and information technologies, it is now feasible to move towards the vision of ubiquitous cities, where virtually everything throughout the city is linked to an information system through technologies such as wireless networking and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, to provide systematic and more efficient management of urban systems, including civil and mechanical infrastructure monitoring.
In this proposal, we note that an important group of basic research topics that are involved in realizing the vision of enabling ubiquitous cities for field-implementation of autonomous condition assessment and health monitoring of its infrastructure, are those that involve the planning, acquisition, and interpretation of large amounts (in speed as well as volume) of data from heterogeneous sensors (both passive as well as active ones) that needs to be fused.
To enhance the efficiency and reliability of the quantitative condition assessment results, a variety of sensing approaches will be utilized: vision-based measurements acquired through the micro UAVs; measurements acquired via passive sensors (e.g., such those used standard nondestructive evaluation approaches; chemical sensors; vibration sensors); and measurements obtained through active-sensing techniques enabled by suites of roving actuator/sensor pairs (e.g., those that use piezoelectric effects).