Structures as Sensors: Inferring Around

Structural responses are often dependent on surrounding infrastructure (e.g., buildings respond to outside traffic; trains depend on track conditions). For the “around” aspect of the framework, my group has been working on indirect surrounding environment monitoring through vehicles and buildings. The vehicle aspect instruments vehicles with vibration sensors (instead of direct instrumentation of infrastructure) to collect information about surrounding infrastructure (e.g., bridge, railway, etc.) for damage diagnosis purposes (environment-aware).

Collaborating with the Port Authority of Allegheny County, we deployed and validated our system to the Pittsburgh Light Rail System (T-system) over 3 year period. Various signal processing and data mining techniques are used to extract meaningful information from the collected signal.