Nowadays, to do ground-based in-situ observations of hard to reach places on earth, researchers carry wild life sensors, cameras and other observation devices into the field, manually configure the devices while on the abroad places. They then fetch the collected data several months later, by hand.
This approach does not scale. Deployment, configuration, observations, reporting of devices and data must be automated.
The Distributed Arctic Observatory (DAO) project proposes a hardware and software solution to these problematics. A DAO observation unit (OU) is a configurable computer node along with a set of sensors. These units will autonomously monitor themselves and the environment, run software layers able to configure and run new applications, synchronize data and finally gather data to centralized servers to execute analysis processes.
The project consist of 5 PhD projects.
