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Environmental monitoring has proven to be a rich source of biological and ecological data but typically does not conform to traditional monitoring techniques. Events of interest are often dynamic and may not tolerate the introduction of a conventional infrastructure without disrupting the environment being monitored. The new NIMS architectures require minimal infrastructure, are rapidly deployable, and have self anchoring coordinate systems. Simple cableways provide system mobility with minimal occlusion of the monitored transect allowing for accurate positioning and high positional resolution within the space of interest. These new systems have been developed to operate in either a two dimensional plane (NIMS-RD: e.g. monitor river or stream properties) or in a three dimensional volume (NIMS-3D: e.g. monitor incident solar radiation under a forest canopy).

Rapidly growing stress on the natural environment has created an urgent demand for new environmental exploration systems that operate remotely and autonomously. As sensor networks are applied to these critical environmental monitoring problems, a series of new requirements have emerged for extensive characterization of dynamic phenomena in three-dimensional environments. The unpredictable presence of obstacles to sensing and the inherent temporal evolution of events create limitations for optimal deployment of sensors in the environment.

Following in the footsteps of the field Networked Infomechanical Systems (NIMS) currently deployed at the James San Jacinto Mountain Reserve in Idyllwild California, two smaller scale NIMS architectures have emerged. The Laboratory Systems (NIMS-LS) provides an experimental testbed for verification of actuated sensing of environmental phenomena. The NIMS-LS System also includes emulation of environmental phenomena (i.e. light distribution in ecosystems). The Rapidly Deployable (NIMS-RD) platform provides a flexible means of sampling environmental phenomena directly with minimal infrastructure, rapid deployability and minimal impact on the environment. NIMS-RD has been deployed at the James San Jacinto Mountain Reserve, Medea Creek in the Santa Monica Mountains, Merced River in Merced CA and White Mountains Research Station near Bishop CA.

The performance of a sensor network may be best judged by the quality of application specific information return. The actual sensing performance of a deployed sensor network depends on several factors which cannot be accounted at design time, such as environmental obstacles to sensing. We propose the use of mobility to overcome the effect of unpredictable environmental influence and to adapt to run time dynamics. Now, mobility with its dependencies such as precise localization and navigation is expensive in terms of hardware resources and energy constraints, and may not be feasible in compact, densely deployed and widespread sensor nodes. We present a method based on low complexity and low energy actuation primitives which are feasible for implementation in sensor networks. We prove how these primitives improve the detection capabilities with theoretical analysis, extensive simulations and real world experiments. The significant coverage advantage recurrent in our investigation justifies our own and other parallel ongoing work in the implementation and refinement of self-actuated systems.

Metrology presents NIMS with a way to monitor specific objects in the environment such as plants and leaves. The addition of sensor fusion allows NIMS to analyze objects from multiple perspectives and provide detailed information on objects in the environment.