Seismic Sensor Network Triangulation

Deployment

Trials run

Wave speed

5.0 km/s

Single sensor readout

Status

Idle — awaiting trigger

How it works

A seismic event radiates a wavefront outward from its origin at a fixed speed. A single sensor only knows the instant the wave arrives and how strong it was — one measurement, two unknowns too many to fix a location.

Each robot in the distributed network records its own arrival time. Because the robots sit at different, known positions, the small differences between their arrival times encode the origin's position and depth. The engine solves the nonlinear system

tᵢ = t₀ + √((x−xᵢ)²+(z−zᵢ)²+depth²) / v

for the unknowns origin (x, z, depth) and trigger time t₀, by Gauss–Newton least squares over every robot that has reported so far — the same principle real seismic and GPS-style multilateration networks use.

Single Sensor — one central station; it fires a generic magnitude alert with no location, illustrating the classic single-point blind spot.
Network — several autonomous sensor-robots spread across the region; no single point of failure, and enough independent arrival times to pinpoint the source.

Sensor robot — idle Sensor robot — detected True origin (revealed) Triangulated estimate

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