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High-precision Time Synchronization Digital Sensing Platform Enabling Connection of a Camera Sensor

Authors:
Narito Kurata

Keywords: Time Synchronization; Chip Scale Atomic Clock; Earthquake Observation; Structural Health Monitoring; Micro Electro Mechanical Systems; Camera Sensor

Abstract:
The authors are conducting research and development of different types of sensor systems for the maintenance of civil infrastructures, such as aging bridges and highways, and buildings. Highly accurate time information is added to measurement data, and a set of sensing data that ensures time synchronization is acquired and used for multimodal analysis of risk. In research so far, as a first step, a sensor device was developed that uses a digital high-precision accelerometer to perform highly-accurate time-synchronized sensing of civil infrastructure, such as bridges and highways, and buildings. A vibration table test was performed on the new sensor device, and its time synchronization performance was verified by comparing the measurement results with multiple sensor devices and a servo-type accelerometer. In this paper, a different type of digital sensing platform has been developed that allows a camera sensor to be connected in addition to a digital accelerometer. By adding a unified time stamp synchronized with the absolute time to data from the digital accelerometer and the image from the camera sensor when data is acquired, the vibration and the image can be measured synchronously. First, a Chip-Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC), which is an ultra-high-precision clock, is mounted on the sensor device, and a mechanism is implemented whereby a time stamp is added to the outputs of the digital accelerometer and the camera sensor with timekeeping precision. Since the timekeeping precision of the CSAC is too high, a delay occurs when a time stamp is added by the CPU of the sensor device. Therefore, a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) dedicated to adding time stamps is prepared. In this paper, the results of a performance verification experiment on a camera sensor mounted on the platform, are described.

Pages: 98 to 104

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2021

Publication date: November 14, 2021

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3514

ISBN: 978-1-61208-918-8

Location: Athens, Greece

Dates: from November 14, 2021 to November 18, 2021