Development of Arkas Sensor Platform and Application for Heavy Snowfall Observation

A sensor platform, which can accommodate various types of sensors and can extract the meaningful information from the sensor data, is necessary for building a sensor network system. In this study, we propose a new sensor platform, Arkas, which can be easily utilized for various environmental observations. The Arkas sensor platform consists of a sensor node which is designed for easy-to-use management provided by the Arkas server application over Android. In order to evaluate the practicality of the proposed sensor platform, a sensor network system for observing snow in Niigata-prefecture, Japan has been developed as an application of the platform. The system utilizes an ultrasonic distance sensor to derive an amount of snow cover and a snowfall from distance data. From experimental evaluations conducted from Dec. 2010 to Mar. 2011, we have confirmed that the system can accurately estimate the amount of snow cover and the snowfall by processing (e.g., noise filtering) the sensor data. As a result, we have concluded that the proposed sensor platform can be used for building a snow observation system and can support human-activities in a area of high snowfall.