Cellular automata for the real world:
dust-inc.com
COMPANY BACKGROUND
Dust Inc. was founded in 2002 to bring the power of pervasive sensor networking to industrial and consumer product markets. We are a privately-held firm headquartered in Berkeley, California. Our team includes leaders in the field of extreme low power computing and communications, brought together by the common goal of creating an industrial grade platform for delivering awareness and communication into everyday objects and environments.
Dust has its technology roots in Engineering at UC Berkeley. In 1997, Kris Pister, a professor at the university, proposed an ambitious project to deliver sensing, computing and networking in a millimeter scale package — essentially an autonomous computer, smaller than a match head but capable of awareness of its environment, simple evaluation of conditions and events, and wireless communication to relay information and raise alerts. The project was called "Smart Dust" and was funded by DARPA the same year.
Since that time, four generations of Smart Dust hardware (called "motes") have been tested and refined. Universities, government research labs and industrial developers have deployed Smart Dust technology in dozens of laboratory and real-world applications. In 1999, a compact but complete operating system called "TinyOS" was added to the Smart Dust platform, and a wide range of novel applications began sprouting up on campuses across the US. Today there are more than 100 organizations using TinyOS in distributed sensor networks for a host of different applications.
The value proposition of pervasive sensor networks is clear and compelling to industry leaders in control systems, logistics, retailing, energy management and a host of other key markets. The Smart Dust platform has gained recognition as the gold standard for delivering this value based on its combination of flexibility, reliability and extreme power management.
Dust Inc brings together the team that created Smart Dust and has driven its development into a complete computing platform with the potential to revolutionize the way we live and do business. |
