Abstract
There is a general tendency in systems for environmental monitoring towards ever more automatic and autonomous operation. Moreover, technologies and instruments are available to reliably interconnect distributed, disparate components. This allows the measurement, logging, data processing and interpretation activities to be carried out by separate units at different locations in near real-time. Building on the results of a previous research and development project at SUPSI, which focused on movement monitoring with GPS, the system has been generalized to accommodate a range of other sensors, thus rendering it even more interesting for geotechnical applications. In particular a laser distance meter and a robotized theodolite have been integrated. First results confirm an expected increase in robustness of the combined measurement network, which is particularly important in unfavorable stand-alone GPS reception conditions. Due to the modular architecture of the system, other sensor types, ranging from simple analog or digital sensors to complex measuring instruments may be supported with minimal effort. Measurements are transmitted via cellular or point-to-point radio links to a control station, which provides for post-processing and system management. The control station may be remotely accessed via an Internet connection. The system takes advantage of a standard and flexible database structure which has been tailored to measurement and monitoring projects using different sensors. The system represents an architecture for remote monitoring tasks requiring a high degree of autonomy, reliability and automation. The solution can be advantageously applied to remote, near real-time measurements of low dynamics movements.
