The continuous size and cost reduction of electronic devices is gradually making the vision of ubiquitous wireless sensors networks a reality. After almost a decade of extensive research, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are in the midst of the transition towards industrial deployment in various application domains such as automotive, environmental monitoring, health care, energy management, and building and industrial automation. BAIA presents a panel of outstanding experts from the academia and the industry who have played an essential role in the history and development of WSNs, including Crossbow's President/CEO, Mike Horton.
BAIA has organized an outstanding panel that will explore the state of wireless sensor networks on the evening of October 8th at UC Berkeley. Panelists include:
Prof. David Culler, UC Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder Arch Rock
Mike Horton, CEO and Co-Founder Crossbow
Prof. Raju Pandey, UC Davis, CTO and Co-Founder Synapsense
Prof. Kris Pister, UC Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder Dust Networks
Dr. Joe Polastre, CTO and Co-Founder Sentilla
Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, UC Berkeley, CTA and Co-Founder Cadence Design Systems
Questions addressed will include:
- What applications will drive the mass deployment of WSNs both in the short and in the long term?
- What players will be most successful in the WSN domain and what business model will they adopt?
- What are the main barriers before wide adoption of WSNs?
- When will the deployment of WSNs happen in large volumes?
The event is free, but limited to 100 attendees. Learn more and register here.
According a report by the FBI, a vehicle is stolen every 26.4 seconds in the United States. The
western states account for the highest rate of thefts in the USA, and 4
of the top 10 metropolitan areas were in California - made me feel very
safe! Remember 'the club' from back in the day? I remember watching the commercials when I was a kid between episodes of Saved by the Bell and thinking that my parents should get one - it seemed like the perfect solution. Check out this commercial from the nineties (love the hairstyles and outfits).
Luckily today, things have progressed, and instead of having to whip out your club and strap it to the steering wheel of your car, you can install SVATS. SVATS is a sensor-network-based vehicle anti-theft system based on Crossbow's MICA2 Mote platform. Conceptualized by researchers at Penn State University, SVATS is designed to address the limitations of high cost, high false-alarm rate and the easy disabling function of current tracking/alarming systems. In this system, the vehicles in an area are outfitted with a sensor node and form a wireless sensor network. The nodes in the network then monitor and identify possible vehicle thefts by detecting unauthorized vehicle movement. When an unauthorized movement is detected, an alert is sent to the base station which sends warning messages to the security office or whomever is responsible for that area. The security system relies on networks of cars constantly gossiping
with their neighbors using the concealed wireless nodes. The cars
raise the alarm when a thief tries to make a getaway.
With vehicles playing an essential part in our every day life, there are many solutions to stop theft from lock systems (like the club), alarm systems (that we all ignore nowadays) and vehicle tracking/recovery systems. Most of these tracking/recovery systems require the user to purchase the product as well as pay a monthly maintenance fee, or use GPS which does not work indoors or is easily located and disabled. SVATS proposes to have a each vehicle equipped with a node, and each parking area forming its own sensor network with base station. Each node is powered by the vehicle's power source and controlled by a remote so that the user can turn it on so that the node sends a 'join' message and broadcasts its 'alive' message periodically. If it does not send out a 'leave' message that is authenticated by the user via remote that turns the node off, the neighboring sensors will detect the movement or should they not receive the 'leave' message report the problem to the base station and owner via alert. To track the vehicle SVATS used roadside access points already deployed to determine where the vehicle had been moved to. The researchers themselves drove off some cars to test how the system worked,
and found that SVATS detected all such "thefts" in a matter of just 4
to 9 seconds. The system was apparently resistant to false alarms
caused by weather, or people walking around the car park, both of which
can affect the signals between sensors.
SVATS included four components network topology management, vehicle theft detection, intra-vehicle networking, and alert reporting. Using the MICA2 Mote platform in the sensor node for this deployment, researchers were able to use the self-forming, ad-hoc capability of the Motes to allow the device to find its neighbors and join the network. The vehicle theft detection was done with two techniques - count-based and statistical-based. RSSI signals and values were also used to determine whether a vehicle had been stolen or not. The system can also detect when a car is moving unexpectedly by
measuring the signal strength of any "alive" messages. If a car detects
significant changes in signal strength, it sends a warning message to
other cars monitoring the same vehicle, because it is likely to be
moving. However,
it is only when a watching car receives more than three such warning
signals from different sources that it will send out a theft alarm
message to the base station. Ensuring that multiple cars must agree on
a threat before the alarm is raised should cut out the false alarms
that plague other anti-theft systems, say the researchers. Experimental evaluation of the SVATS
system used a laptop as a base station and one sensor per vehicle in a
Penn State parking lot. The base station transmitted once per second
while the vehicle sensors sent live messages every 200 milliseconds.
The key to SVATS is that the sensor nodes are cheap and easy to deploy. They are designed to work in a large network that creates a smart and safe environment. This solution can be deployed incrementally and the rapid response time it provides is motivation enough to install the SVATS sensor nodes. This research was funded by NSF and the Army research office. The researchers presented information on their system at the Institute
of Electrical and Electronic Engineer's Infocom 2008 Conference in
Phoenix.
As one person said, stealing a car wont be easy for thieves anymore, thanks to this new type of car alarm that enables the vehicles to look after each other"s safety - just like
a herd of animals under any potential threat from predators.
On Tuesday of this week, Crossbowannounced the release of ēKo™ Pro Series, a turnkey live data, wireless crop monitoring system enabling precision agriculture. The ēKo Pro Series follows Crossbow’s already popular sensor and navigation solutions for heavy agricultural equipment. See the video below for additional details.
ēKo™ represents the next generation in crop monitoring and precision agriculture techniques, employing a mesh network of wireless sensors and providing vital live data about crop health, vigor and growth progress via a simple internet browser. Among others, the ēKo Pro Series monitoring solution features the following innovations: • Solar-powered, field-deployed wireless sensor nodes, which require no electrical power so that sensors can be placed where needed. • Simple-to-use, web-based data viewing that allows remote access to live sensor data, critical trend charts and alarm settings - all of which are highly customizable. • Leading-edge, reliable wireless mesh network technology that is self-configuring and self-healing, thus providing effortless setup and easy scalability, where additional wireless nodes and sensors can be added easily by non-technical users.
ēKo Pro Series drives increased profits and competitive advantage by enabling lower input costs, mitigating crop loss risks, increasing per-acre yields, and delivering higher quality crops with greater consistency.
“ēKo Pro Series enables growers to consistently improve yield and quality regardless of the variability in the terrain, soil or micro-climates,” said Robert Robinson, VP of Sales and Marketing at Crossbow. “Growers can now overcome the traditional trade off between higher yields vs. higher quality and can achieve a higher average price on larger harvests consistently by executing precision agriculture techniques with ēKo Pro Series data."
ēKo eliminates concerns about reliability and complexity in applying wireless technology to deficit irrigation and precision agriculture by delivering a more integrated solution including all the sensors, software application, sensor nodes, and network components that growers need to quickly and easily deploy a wireless monitoring system.
“ēKo takes crop monitoring using wireless technology to whole new levels in terms of reliability, flexibility, and ease,” said Alan Broad, Director of Environmental Products at Crossbow. “Its mesh based architecture with capabilities such as data re-routing, self-organizing/self-healing network, autodetection of new nodes delivers proven reliability, effortless deployment, and easy scalability. Moreover, the unique sensor interface provides the flexibility to add any sensor from third-party vendors in the future."
The ēKo Pro Series Starter Kit provides a quick, easy way to get started with wireless monitoring. It includes an ēKo Pro Series Network Gateway, 3 ēKo Pro Series wireless nodes, 6 soil moisture/ temperature sensors, 1 ambient temperature sensor, and built-in web-based monitoring application. Additional wireless nodes and sensors are simple to add. The new ēKo Pro Series will begin shipping in volume in April 2008. Pricing and advanced sales inquiries may be directed to sales@xbow.com. Crossbow previewed the ēKo Pro Series at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento, California on January 29-31 this week. To learn more about the use of ēKo for wireless crop monitoring, visit www.xbow.com/eKo.
Crossbow Technology's Imote2 platform was nominated for the "Best of Sensors Expo" award in the 'Communications and Networking' category. The "Best of Sensors Expo" Awards honor the
most exciting new products on display at the Sensors Expo and Conference,
which took place at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont,
IL, last week. On Wednesday, June 13th, the awards were announced and the Imote2 platform received a bronze award for its breakthrough capabilities.
The Imote2 platform, which was commercially available at the end of March, is a high-performance wireless sensor network node that provides a high-throughput processor and radio platform which breaks the computational and memory limitations of current platforms by orders of magnitude while enabling low-power operation for battery-powered sensor network applications. Crossbow also offers a companion sensor board with 3-axis accelerometer, temperature, humidity, light and four channels of user-customizable A/D input. Based on the Marvell PXA architecture, it supports a 250kb/s
data rate with an
IEEE 802.15.4 compliant 2.4GHz band radio. Full 32-bit computing is supported
at speeds up to 416 MHz. The Imote2 provides the most
extensive support for development environment / operating systems, including
TinyOS, SOS, and Linux. The Imote2
is used for advanced, compute-intensive wireless sensor applications
such as digital imaging, industrial vibration monitoring, seismic and
acoustic based signal processing, and machine condition monitoring. The
Imote2 provides the highest performance, lowest power wireless sensor
solution compared to existing alternatives in the market today.
At Sensors Expo, Crossbow announced the Imote2.Builder for the .NET Micro Framework, the Imote2 SDK based on the Microsoft
.NET Micro Framework. The Imote2.Builder is the industry's first set of
tools for accelerating the development of entirely new wireless sensor
applications on the Marvell PXA hardware platform on which the Imote2
is built. The .Builder kit simplifies and accelerates the design of wireless sensor applications by combining two powerful ingredients to create a superior embedded design: Crossbow's Imote2 hardware module and the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework software. Together they provide new developers with an industry-leading development experience for rapid prototyping of wireless sensor applications by creating proof of concept in hours or days, not weeks or months, as well as quick, familiar debugging using Microsoft's Visual Studio environment to shift the focus to the code, not the tools. The Microsoft .NET Micro Framework combines the reliability and
efficiency of managed code with the premier development tools of
Microsoft Visual Studio to deliver exceptional productivity for
developing embedded applications on small devices.
The award indicates Crossbow's continued efforts to provide our customers with cutting-edge leading technology that addresses the demands for wireless sensor networks in the market today. Crossbow's complete portfolio of research and development platforms, to our wide selection of commercial-grade hardware and software tools, give customers the ability to fulfill all their WSN product needs quickly and easily.
To sense or not to sense...that was the question at the Extreme Sensing competition held during IPSN 2007 a few weeks ago. Crossbow was a sponsor of the International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks and co-chaired the session on Sensor Platforms, Tools and Design Methods (SPOTS). The Extreme Sensing competition presented attendees with a live deployment that showcased the ability of wireless sensor networks to capture real-time data quickly and accurately. The challenge was for each team to build a sensor system using five sensors or less that could count people walking through a 10ft x 10ft arena. Each phase consisted of a different challenge. In Phase 1, the arena was placed in a high traffic area and teams were to sense normal foot traffic from conference attendees for the duration of 10 minutes. In Phase 2, each team was to try and "walk" through the arena 10 times without being detected by the opponent's sensors to increase their own score while decreasing the scores of their opponents.
The rules were simple - each team would need to build a sensing system that counted the number of people exiting the arena while also leaving two sides and the center unobstructed for people to walk. The teams were allowed to use unobtrusive sensors such as floor sensors, passive infrared motion sensors, ultrasound, doppler radar, lasers, etc. The restrictions stipulated that no system could have wires more than 12 inches in length, and no system could use more than five pixels in total (i.e. cameras or sensors). Each system was to immediately and automatically report scores to the scoring server with no human intervention.
It was the "Pixelators" from MIT who took home the gold! They were able to count 203 out of 204 people with their RSSI based, single-pixel radio sensor! During Phase 1 all teams performed equally. However, it was during Phase 2 and the use of adversarial strategies that the Pixelators shone improving their scores while the remaining teams fell away. The video below features the conference attendees at IPSN participating in the Extreme Sensing competition and the opposing teams hopping, crawling and doing little less than a conga line to take home the coveted grand prize.
