3D visualization and analysis of a large amount of real-time and non-real-time data

The scope of the project is to design and develop a VR application for representing and analyze high-rate data from Fibre Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors. Those sensors are able to determine the variation of the refractive index of the optical fibre core caused by temperature, strain, pressure, tilt, displacement, acceleration, load and more. FBG technology is present in a wide range of application, such as aeronautic, automotive, civil engineering structure monitoring and undersea oil exploration. The number of applications will increase in the next years thanks to their properties, like small size, light weight, multiplexing capability and immunity to electromagnetic interference. The FBGs are enabled by an interrogator, a specialized hardware that generates UV lasers and reads the information coming from the sensors. Unfortunately there is no standard protocol for the communication with the interrogator, so each manufacture equips their interrogator with a proprietary solution. For the project I use as interrogator the "SmartScan FBG Interrogator" from "Smart Fibres". This machine is able to get information from 4 different channels of fiber with 16 different gratings for each channel. The interrogator communicates the data from the sensors via Ethernet with a C++ application, the middleware. The application is capable in one side to establish a connection with the interrogator via Ethernet and in the other side it is able to store data in a MongoDB database or send them directly via TCP-IP to the VR application. The middleware is a multi thread application running on a Raspberry Pi. This board is extremely useful on our project because of its small factor and its easy configuration for multiple connections. For data storage we need a fast write database with a built-in notification framework. In this scope the perfect fit is MongoDB, thanks to its high rate write time and its notification framework "Change Stream". Change Stream is a functionality available for replica set deployment of MongoDB. Thanks to this feature, various application can subscribe to all data changes on a single collection, a database, or an entire deployment, and immediately react to them. In the scope of the project, the middleware is writing data coming from the sensors to the Mongodb instance and the 3D application will subscribe to the changes, receiving in real-time the newest value. The Analysis and Visualization framework is a 3D application developed in Unity. This application is able to get real-time and no real-time data coming from the sensor and show as heat map on a 3D model or display them on a graph. For real-time data it is possible to receive data directly from the middleware establishing a TCP-IP connection or it can subscribe to a Mongodb instance and receive the real-time sensors data with a Change Stream. For non real-time data instead it is able to read data from a Mongodb collection. The project is part of a collaboration with the DAUIN (Department of Control and Computer Engineering) and DIMEAS (Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) of Politecnico di Torino, as part of the Inter-Dipartimental Center for Photonic technologies (PhotoNext). The entire framework is designed to analyze and monitor aircraft designed by ICARUS team in Politecnico of Torino, for the scope of their last engineered aircraft "ANUBIS". The sensors are able to detect bending of the wing during the simulation and the temperature in specific spots