Development of pervasive compaction monitoring interface for soil compactor — A GPS/GSM based approach

Pervasive computing provides an attractive visionfor the future. Mobile and stationary devices will dynamically connect and coordinate to seamlessly help people to implement their tasks. However, in reality still there are practices which require pervasive monitoring especially in the domain of geo vehicle monitoring. To make the vision of pervasive computing technologies for the geo vehicle monitoring we are integrating technologies like GPS (Global Positioning Technology), GSM (Global System for Mobile) for compaction monitoring. GPS is recently used for wide applications like orbit identification and positioning. GPS need some compatible receivers which support location-awareness using positioning technique like LBS (Location Based System). Soil compaction is a form of physical degradation resulting in densification and distortion of the soil where biological activity, porosity and permeability were reduced, soil strength is increased and soil structure partly destroyed. Monitoring the soil compaction manually in the workspace is not reliable and continuous monitoring by a single person may not be feasible. This would be the motivation to choose wireless communication. The compaction data and the location data will be sent to the server for remote monitoring. GSM will allow us to transmit the data to the remote server. The objective of this paper is to provide better accuracy with low cost GPS receiver´s positioning results. This paper makes use of GPS, ARM7/TDMI (LPC2378) family and GSM. NMEA (National Marine Electronics Association) data acquisition from GPS is monitored. Compaction input is interfaced with GPS coordinates. Alerts can be sent from the vehicle to the user mobile phone through GSM communication using AT commands.