Instrumented sensor systems

In modeling and designing sensor systems, there is always a tradeoff between increasing the robustness of the sensor system and increasing the efficiency of sensor use. To compare alternative solutions, we need to define quantitative measures that capture the required sensor system characteristics such as time and space complexity, robustness, error variance, etc. Our goal is to develop tools to assist selecting between the tradeoffs and defining models of global data values which establish a closer tie between data and its use. We propose to introduce the notion of instrumented sensor system for online monitoring and debugging. To achieve our goal, we start by defining a sensor model using formal semantics techniques. In this paper, we show that an operational semantics of logical sensor systems provides a strong computational and operational engine that can be used to define and propagate several quantitative measures to evaluate and compare between design alternatives. The application of the proposed modeling approach is illustrated by an example in which two sensing strategies for determining wall pose using sonar sensors are compared.