This proposal seeks funding for a four-year research programme to develop an autonomous, intelligent system to obtain a revolutionary solution for condition/structural health intelligent monitoring, with specific applications in condition monitoring of railways and in-service Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) for nuclear applications. This project addresses important goals: low cost and low power consumption sensor networks, sensor exploration, software architectures, autonomous data fusion and intelligent system management, spectrally efficient and reliable communications with novel approaches of radio frequency identification (RFID) based passive sensing networks, non-linear feature extraction and model based fusion, compressed sensing, cloud-based computing and decision making. The research will extend our knowledge in several complementary areas: low cost sensor technologies, wireless sensor network (WSN) for NDE and structural health monitoring (SHM), feature extraction and fusion, robust communication, and software architectures. The work will be undertaken jointly by cross-disciplinary research teams from Newcastle, Sheffield and York Universities, in collaboration with industrial strategic partners.