Let's Vibrate with Vibration: Augmenting Structural Engineering with Low-Cost Vibration Sensing

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost vibration sensing system using piezoelectric sensors to classify various civil structures with high accuracy and uncovers a new relation between vibration and height in the time domain.

Contribution

It introduces a novel low-cost vibration sensing approach for structural classification and reveals a new time-domain relation between vibration and height, previously explored only in the frequency domain.

Findings

Achieved 97% classification accuracy for five structure types.

Discovered a new time-domain relation between vibration and height.

Validated the effectiveness of low-cost sensors for structural analysis.

Abstract

Using low-cost piezoelectric sensors to sense structural vibration exhibits great potential in augmenting structural engineering, which is yet to be explored in the literature to the best of our knowledge. Examples of such unexplored augmentation include classifying diverse structures (such as building, flyover, foot over-bridge, etc.), and relating the extent of vibration generated at different height of a structure and the associated height. Accordingly, to explore these cases, we develop a low-cost piezoelectric sensor-based vibration sensing system aiming to remotely collect real vibration data from diversified civil structures. We dig into our collected sensed data to classify five different types of structures through rigorous statistical and machine-learning-based analyses. Our analyses achieve a classification accuracy of up to 97% with an F1 score of 0.97. Nonetheless, in the rarely explored time domain, our analyses reveal a novel modality of relation between vibration generated at different heights of a structure and the associated height, which was explored in the frequency domain earlier in the literature with expensive sensors.