What is Sensor Andrew?

Sensor Andrew is a large-scale effort to widely deploy sensing devices across Carnegie Mellon University. We envision a broad set of applications ranging from infrastructure monitoring, first-responder support, quality of life for the disabled, water distribution monitoring, building power monitoring and control, social networking and biometric systems for campus security.

Researchers have already successfully built many similar sensor networking applications, but they are typically isolated, small-scale and short-lived experiments. One of the primary goals of Sensor Andrew is to have a living laboratory where applications can be rapidly prototyped at scale.

Imagine an infrastructure monitoring system that could immediately alert the campus facilities personnel in the event of broken water pipes or power outages. At the same time, another application leveraging some of the same sensors could suggesting strategies for reducing building energy costs. Application developers should be able to directly utilize physical data from the environment without having to re-invent lower-level interfaces.

To make this possible, there needs to be a common language to communicate transducer data that is scalable, extensible, easy to integrate with processing agents, that supports fine-grained access control and maintains privacy.