Civil Systems Program Takes Off
Expanding the World of Civil Engineering
Last July, PhD student Sivakumar Rathinam launched an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a wingspan of about six-feet from a Central Valley airport to test its ability to follow a linear structure autonomously and collect information about the structure. In this case, the structure was a half-mile stretch of the nearly 450-mile California aqueduct, which transports water from the northern part of the state to the south.
UAVs equipped with inexpensive cameras are already being tested for use in traffic surveillance, providing a more global point of view than is available through information gathered from loop detectors. Rathinam, a doctoral student in the Civil Systems Program believes that UAVs equipped with machine vision have the potential to revolutionize the inspection of vast infrastructures such as oil or gas pipelines, highways, levees, and canals.
"Currently, manned flights inspect sites like these," says Rathinam, "Small autonomous UAVs equipped with cameras provide a low-cost alternative for some of these routine monitoring tasks, and can be used in situations where manned flights are dangerous and not possible." It is also less expensive.
Rathinam's project (see paper, "Vision-Based Following of Structures Using a UAV") is one of many within the four-year-old Civil Systems Program that illustrates how the definition of civil engineering is changing.
Large systems like aqueducts, roads, bridges, and levees have long been the province of civil engineers, including transportation engineers, who design and build them. But technology is providing new tools that enable civil engineers to substantially expand their scope.
The Civil Systems Program was initiated in 2002 by a group of Civil and Environmental Engineering professors including ITS Director Samer Madanat, former ITS Director Adib Kanafani, who was then CEE department chair, Raja Sengupta, Steven Glaser (now the Civil Systems Program Chair) and other faculty members.
"We recognized that advances in sensing, communication and information technology were becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous, and when applied to civil engineering problems these technologies opened doors to new possibilities," explains Madanat.
In fact, PATH (the California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways), a research program administered by ITS, first applied new technologies to transportation engineering to develop intelligent transportation systems aimed at increasing highway capacity and safety, and reducing traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption.
"PATH was an early example of the exciting possibilities that can happen when we bring advanced sensing, communication and computing to bear on civil engineering problems," explained Madanat. "You could say that PATH was the first application of civil systems.'"
The modernization of civil engineering
The goal of the Civil Systems Program is to help civil engineering students who understand large infrastructures—highways, water, buildings, airspace—to develop and use these new technologies. In the process the program is modernizing the definition of civil engineering.
"Our niche in the field of systems is to graduate doctoral students who can develop tools to enable civil engineers to better design, build and manage the large infrastructures," explains Sengupta, the first full-time professor hired for the program.
"We hope to make students familiar with both the technology as well as a particular domain—such as the highway system or the air traffic system." The program offers engineering students a way to combine the abstract and the concrete, technology and a particular domain, field knowledge and scientific knowledge.
As Assistant Professor Alexandre Bayen, who is also teaching a course in the program, puts it: "Raja Sengupta was trained as an electrical engineer. I was trained as an aerospace engineer, and yet we both work on civil engineering applications. If you do sensor networks for a particular application, you have to know this particular application. If you do sensor networks for highways, you have to know the physics of the highways. Combinatorial optimization and partial differential equations are not traditionally part of civil engineering. Our mission is to bring these fields into civil engineering so that we do the job of system building for civil engineering systems ourselves.
"We're civil engineers. Should we just pose the problem and leave the problems to others to solve?" asks Bayen. "Do we let electrical engineers do the sensors, computer scientists do the software, and mechanical engineers do the building? Obviously not, which is why we need systems engineering in civil engineering."
Glaser says simply, "This program allows us to bring in different kinds of people and different tools. We have at least a dozen students in the program who would never have been in civil engineering."
Adds Madanat, "The best students look for the most challenging research problems. We think they will find these in the Civil Systems Program."
The program offers both a Master's and PhD degree and attracts graduate students from a variety of backgrounds: civil and environmental engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, mathematics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, engineering geology and information technology.
Students are drawn to the program because it's an "opportunity to do interdisciplinary work," adds Sengupta. "In this way it gives them a greater sense of academic freedom."
In fact, as a measure of the program's appeal to students with a variety of engineering backgrounds, Bayen began teaching a new course this semester that is cross-listed in electrical, mechanical and civil and environmental engineering.
The class, "Control and optimization of distributed systems and partial differential equations," emphasizes networks. Applications include networks of one-dimensional systems, such as water distribution channels, electromagnetic waves in transmission cables, towed cable systems for marine oil exploration, highway systems, oil drilling, mine ventilation networks and blood circulation in vessels.
Twenty-six students are currently enrolled in the class, which was offered for the first time this semester. Half are civil and environmental engineering students; the other half are equally divided between mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) students.
"This is really what we wanted to achieve here," adds Bayen. "We want civil engineers to talk to electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. They are different students with different abilities, but we want to create a unique language for these problems, a unique framework that is interdisciplinary."
An array of projects
Later this year Civil Systems Program graduate students will launch foot-long yellow cylinders topped with antennae into the marshy waters of Dutch Slough and Frank's Tract in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as part of another program project.
The cylinders will follow the ebb and flow of the water, collecting information that will become the basis of algorithms used to reconstruct the velocity of the water, the propagation of contaminants, and sediment intrusions. If all goes well, in a couple of years the cylinders—like waterborne UAVs—will perform their tasks autonomously.
Some students in the program are developing tools in embedded computing for use in traffic signal coordination, while others are using combinatorial optimization algorithms to work with NASA Ames on network flow modeling for air traffic control.
Additional projects in the program include: down-hole seismic arrays for earthquake site monitoring and geophysical exploration; and smart cars with embedded computing that turns vehicles into a vast mobile sensor fleet.
For more information, see the Civil Systems Program Web site. http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/sys/
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*FACET image courtesy of NASA Ames
Last updated: June 12, 2006