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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: waitwatchwander who wrote (5803)	2/20/2003 9:35:03 AM
From: waitwatchwander	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12247

The Intelligent Swarm - Dust Inc.'s tiny sensors could one day remotely monitor traffic, temperature, and troop movements. business2.com By Rafe Needleman, February 13, 2003 One ant, by itself, is innocuous. But a line of ants in your house is disturbing. And an anthill, up close, is frightening. With ants, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts -- a lot greater, since a colony of ants is coordinated, effective, and eerily intelligent. Technology, recently, has learned from the ants, creating a new kind of computer that's useless by itself but formidable in a swarm. Dust Inc. designs small computers it calls motes, and uses them as platforms to collect data with a variety of sensors. Currently, a single mote is a little bigger than a 9-volt battery, but the computers are getting smaller as Dust continues to design custom hardware for its clients, which range from startups like Sensicast to established sensor companies like Honeywell (HON). Some motes have vibration or sound sensors, others detect magnetic fields or light, and still others wrap around electrical cables to gauge the amount of current being drawn. The motes use very low-power CPUs and a super-small open-source operating system called TinyOS, developed at the University of California at Berkeley. The operating life of a battery-powered mote can be several years. The motes have radios in them to communicate their sensor readings. This is where things get really interesting. The low-power radios attached to these low-power computers don't have enough range to continuously broadcast back to a central base station. Instead, they wake up once in a while, at predetermined times, and blast their data to a nearby mote, which then collects and retransmits that data to another nearby mote, and so on, until finally the data reaches a central collection node or recording computer. The motes set up this bucket-brigade communication automatically. If the location of a few of the motes is known, the rest can be scattered pretty much randomly and the network will still be able to tell where each individual mote is, even though most individual motes will have no inherent data on their own positions. This is what's known as a self-organizing sensor network, and it's a powerful idea. One obvious application is military: Air-drop a bunch of vibration sensors into the Iraqi desert and they can report vehicle and personnel movement. A similar technique could be used to gather data on seismic activity or monitor highway traffic. In a different vein, a network of heat and light sensor motes in a building would be much less expensive to install than the wired versions. And if a shipping company put motes on all its high-value containers (as well as a few data-collecting nodes in trucks, planes, or ships), it could know where all its boxes were at all times, or at least where a box was until right before it dropped off the network by going out of range of another box. (Dust is in talks with Qualcomm (QCOM), which makes the popular Omnitracs truck fleet management system.) Naturally, these remote eyes and ears raise a heap of privacy issues. Consider this: What if all cars had motes and somebody wanted to know where yours was? Or all computers? Or watches? Dust CEO Kris Pister says he's in the process of puzzling out solutions. Dust does the design work to put motes together, and Pister says he has intellectual property in some key areas, like ultralow-power analog-to-digital converters, which are necessary for small and long-lasting motes. Mesh networking isn't a brand-new idea, although most of the mesh-centric companies I've seen so far have used the technology for real-time wireless Internet or voice communication, not telemetry. And likewise, small computers and sensors are hardly innovative. But combining small sensors, low-power computers, and mesh radios in the manner I've just described makes for a new technological platform that already has important uses and applications. -Rafe Needleman