Many underwater monitoring tasks, such as submarine life studies and pipeline inspections, are usually performed manually. Automated underwater monitoring has the potential to increase safety, improve timeliness, and decrease costs. We propose a hybrid solution of stationary sensor buoys and swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) and report on our current progress of its realization. Ou...

The foundational concept for our research, which is largely shared by statisticians and ecologists, is that biodiversity is one of the most important indicators for environmental assessment. Because this indicator decreases in relation to ecosystem stressors, its measurement is essential for predicting future biological impacts of environmental damages. Although many indices have been proposed,...

A multiagent architecture for vehicle and structural health monitoring is proposed. A prototype using this architecture was developed using JADE. Critical aspects of the design were verified using the SPIN model checker. The tasks in our framework are related to datafusion levels and Gibson’s realist position on direct perception of objects and affordances. We show how a system consisting of a ...

Ten hand-touch sites were screened weekly on two surgical wards over two consecutive six-month periods. The results were analysed using hygiene standards, which specify (i) an aerobic colony count (ACC) > 2.5 cfu/cm(2), and (ii) presence of coagulase-positive staphylococci, as hygiene failures. Sites most often failing the standards were beds and hoist (64%: 33 of 52 weeks), bedside lockers (62...

The global spread of wireless networks brings a great opportunity for their use in environmental studies. Weather, atmospheric conditions, and constituents cause propagation impairments on radio links. As such, while providing communication facilities, existing wireless communication systems can be used as a widely distributed, high-resolution atmospheric observation network, operating in real ...

Environmental safety is the key requirements of our well-being. Rapid urbanization and industrialization have greatly contributed several pollutants such as heavy metals, inorganic and organic compounds, pesticides, toxins, endocrine disrupting hormones, etc. to the environment. The presence of such pollutants is becoming a major global challenge for environmental security and human health. Alt...

(6) Long-term unattended operation. (7) Periodic recalibration. (8) Easy on-site maintenance. Water quality Water quality is a subject of increasing public interest and awareness. With regard to chemical parameters in particular it is also an area that has been the subject of increasingly stringent national and international legislation based on EC directives, for example, for the discharge of ...

Environmental monitoring is the continuous, automated observation of changes in the environment. Powerful models, methods, and systems that have been developed for the purpose of environmental monitoring are now leaving the laboratory setting, and some of them are already being applied. When they are applied in countries that have well established environmental authorities and a high population...

Environmental observation applications are designed for monitoring phenomena using heterogeneous sensor data types and for providing derived and often integrated information. To effectively handle such a large variety of different sensors, both in scale and type and data volume, we propose a geosensor abstraction for large-scale geosensor networks. Our SGSA(Slope Grid for Sensor Data Abstractio...

While environmental issues keep gaining increasing attention from the public opinion and policy makers, several experiments demonstrated the feasibility of wireless sensor networks to be used in a large variety of environmental monitoring applications. Focusing on the assessment of environmental noise pollution in urban areas, we provide qualitative considerations and preliminary experimental r...