Industrial Technology Research Institute

Technology Overview

In recent years, due to extreme climate change and other issues, many countries have suffered severe disasters such as heavy rains and landslides. In order to solve this problem, ITRI has developed a soil-powered autonomous landslide surveillance system to break through the constraints of energy supply and system energy consumption and also designed a soil moisture sensor that uses soil ions to generate self-generated electricity as a trigger for alert events. When the water content exceeds a certain value, the system will automatically activate the alarm to warn the occurrence of landslides.

Applications & Benefits

The soil-powered autonomous landslide surveillance system uses the self-generated soil moisture sensor as the alert event trigger. When there is no alert, all the sensors and the data processing and transmission system will be in deep sleep, which can greatly reduce the energy consumption of the system; when the self-generated soil moisture sensor is converted into electrical energy by the environmental warning, the system will activate auxiliary sensors, such as accelerometers and displacement sensors, and perform accurate environmental data monitoring; and when there is a real emergency, the wireless module will be turned on to issue a warning. The soil-powered autonomous landslide surveillance system with autonomous power generation can perform large-scale multi-point distribution, and its service life is extended by decades compared with existing battery-powered systems.

The soil-powered autonomous landslide surveillance system is characterized by effective energy recovery from nature and ultra-low power consumption sensing technology. In addition to the monitoring of natural disasters, it can be further applied in the fields of land monitoring and smart agriculture in the future. It can also be extended to a variety of industrial applications for sensing needs. The soil-powered autonomous landslide surveillance system can be used as a basic platform for wireless sensor network technology as well as obtaining land and environmental information with the support of long-term energy solutions.