Multiscale Sensing: A new paradigm for actuated sensing of high frequency dynamic phenomena

Many environmental applications require high temporal frequency (rapidly changing) and spatially distributed phenomena to be sampled with high fidelity. This requires mobile sensing elements to perform guided sampling in regions of high variability. We propose a multiscale approach for efficiently sampling such phenomena. This approach introduces a hierarchy of sensors according to the sampling fidelity, spatial coverage, and mobility characteristics. In this paper, we report the development of a two-tier multiscale system where information from a low-fidelity, high spatial (global) sensor actuates a mobile robotic node, carrying a high-fidelity, low spatial coverage (spot measurement) sensor, to perform guided sampling in the regions of high phenomenon variability. As a case study of the proposed multiscale paradigm, we investigated the spatiotemporal distribution of the light intensity in a forest understory. The performance of the multiscale approach is verified in simulation and on a physical system. Results suggest that our approach is adequate for the problem of high-frequency spatiotemporal phenomena sampling and significantly outperforms traditional sampling approaches such as a raster scan