[MLB-WIRELESS] RE: not wifi related but interesting all the same

[Dean Collins]

[PARA]advertisement[NL][PARA][PARA]The Intelligent Swarm
Dust Inc.'s tiny sensors could one day remotely monitor traffic,
temperature, and troop movements.
By Rafe Needleman, February 13, 2003
[NL]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. [NL][NL]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.
[NL][NL]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. [NL][NL]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.) [NL][NL][PARA]FAST
FACTS[PARA]Dust Inc.[PARA]www.dust-inc.com
CEO	Kris Pister, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at
UC Berkeley (currently on leave)
HQ	Berkeley, Calif.
FOUNDED	2002
EMPLOYEES	6
FUNDING	Currently raising first venture round
PROFITABLE?	Has revenues, but won't disclose profitability projections
MARKET	Sensor networks


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. [NL][NL]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. [NL][NL]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. [NL][NL]-Rafe Needleman
[NL][NL]What's Next: http://www.business2.com/whatsnext [NL][NL][NL]



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