iFit, UbiFit, Wii all be Fit

In today's world of excitement and constant stimulation it is sad to note that most people are not fit. We are constantly sitting - at work in our cubicles, at home in front of the TV, on the couch playing video games, staring into our computer screens without moving... the busy lives we lead do not allow us to focus on our fitness. This trend has been noticed by organizations, researchers and companies worldwide. It has even taken over the gaming world. As I turned off my Wii system the other night after a rousing session of Guitar Hero, I began to think about Nintendo's new Wii Fit device. The idea of the Wii Fit is to offer "an environment in which working out is less daunting and as a result enjoyable -- fun, even." Imagine having the capabilities of the Wii Fit in a mobile device that can monitor your activity all the time. The idea of fitness and self image is nothing new to society but with the various technologies being employed it is becoming even easier to improve your fitness and be aware of your body's activity. So why don't UbiFit...?

Researchers at University of Washington and Intel Research Seattle have been investigating how ubiquitous computing can help encourage people to sustain an increased level of physical activity that can be determined by developing a device that can be used to monitor a person's physical activity and fitness. This change is only possible by sensing the person's physical activities (i.e. walking, sitting, etc.), modeling this information and supporting real-time awareness and feedback goals with automated journaling and methods to motivate sustained behavior changes. UbiFit is geared to improving fitness through mobile devices. Now instead of calculating the steps you took with your pedometer and logging how many miles you ran, etc., your UbiFit system will collect and store all of that data for you for real-time analysis. This unique mobile sensing platform is built around the Imote2 platform. The Imote2 is an advanced wireless platform designed for data rich wireless sensor networks requring a higher bandwidth than the traditional Mote devices. Its high performance capability and small size made it ideal for this application.

In the UbiFit project, researchers are investigating how ubiquitous computing can help encourage people to sustain an increased level of physical activity. Overweight and obesity, which are linked to several serious health problems, have become a global epidemic, affecting over one billion adults worldwide. While the medical community agrees that physical activity and fitness are essential to addressing this epidemic, many adults have difficulty increasing and then maintaining physical activity in their everyday lives. Enter UbiFit. Embedded activity recognition systems typically have three main components such as 1) a low-level sensing module that continuously gathers relevant information about activities using microphones, accelerometers, light sensors, 2) a feature processing and selection module that processes the raw sensor data into features that help discriminate between activities, and 3) a classification module that uses the features to infer what activity an individual or group of individuals is engaged in and analyze the data against the individuals set goals.

The sensor component of the UbiFit system consists of the 'Mobile Sensing Platform' (MSP). This device has ten built-in sensors such as a 3D accelerometer, 2D compass, barometer, humidity, visible light, infrared light, temperature with UART, GPIO breakouts for additional sensors. The wearable MSP devices have 2GB flash storage and uses the Linux OS. The raw data is collected from the sensors on the MSP and fed to the Imote2. This data is then sent to a cellular or PDA like device. The feature of the UbiFit system that makes it appealing to users is its client interface called UbiFit garden. The UbiFit garden uses the on-body sensing, real-time statistical modeling of the  activity data and its novel personal display to encourage physical activity. This is not limited to detecting a specific pre-planned physical activity such as using the Nintendo Wii Fit or Nike+ system. It is not just a physical activity detection device like a pedometer. The UbiFit garden encompasses all these areas and rolls it into an easy to use and carry personal fitness monitoring device. Set up to be background on a users cellular device, the UbiFit garden background blooms on the user's mobile phone providing key information at-a-glance such as whether they are having an active/inactive week, whether they have met their weekly goal, etc. and encouraging them to incorporate physical activity into everyday life.

For more details on this project visit their site here, and for more details on the Imote2 platform visit Crossbow's site here. Now, get up off of that couch, strap on those walking shoes and UbiFit!

Extending Our Senses into the Physical World

The picture of a future with wireless sensor networks-webs of sensory devices that function without a central infrastructure--is quickly coming into sharper focus through the work of Los Alamos National Laboratory computer scientist Sami Ayyorgun. Using Crossbow's TelosB Motes in their research, proponents of this new technology see a world with deployments to improve a wide range of operations.

Engineers could wirelessly monitor miles of gas and oil pipelines stretching across arid land for ruptures, damage, and tampering. Rescue workers might detect signs of life under the rubble of a collapsed building after an earthquake, thanks to a network of sensors inside the structure. Armed forces could keep an eye on a combat zone or a vast international border via a sensor network that could promptly provide alerts of any intrusion or illicit trafficking.

"It's not easy to envision the impacts that sensor networks will make, both socially and economically," Ayyorgun said. "Like many other researchers, I think they are likely to rival the impact that the Internet has made on our lives."

Ayyrogun has developed a new communication scheme that brings the reality of these and other applications a step closer. He has shown for the first time that concurrent gains in many measures of performance are possible, including connectivity, energy, delay, throughput, system longevity, coverage, and security.

In recognition of the multifaceted improvements Ayyorgun's research makes on state-of-the-art technology in this field, his recent paper, "Towards a Self-organizing Stochastic-Communications Paradigm for Wireless Ad-hoc/Sensor Networks," has been nominated for the Best-Paper Award from a pool of more than 250 manuscripts at the International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Ayyorgun will present the paper at this prestigious meeting of the IEEE beginning September 29, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Like cell phones, wireless sensor networks depend on small, independently powered devices, often called motes, to communicate. But unlike cell phones, which always relay their signal through a base station such as a tower, multihop sensor motes use each other to relay signals, transmitting communiqués through a series of "hops" from one mote to the next. Without the need to build a mesh of base stations that must be wired or have a substantial supply of energy, creating information-bearing ad-hoc networks to suit each unique set of circumstances would significantly reduce costs.

"Wiring or 'beefing up' system resources is expensive and is often not feasible for many applications," Ayyorgun said, calling that a "major impetus" for wireless network research. But with nearly all motes dependent on a portable source of power like a battery, it is important that the devices be as energy efficient as possible. "Energy efficiency is a first-class design criterion," he said.

And energy utilization isn't the only consideration. Other performance aspects of concern include the system's connectivity; the delay, or time it takes for data to be transported; the throughput, which measures the amount of data the system can handle at once; and network security, to name a few. Many solutions aimed at advancing wireless sensor networks have managed to improve performance over at most a few metrics at the expense of others. Ayyorgun analogizes the conundrum to a Rubik's cube, the cube-shaped toy in which the aim is to match each of the six sides with one distinct color. Often, gains in one aspect of wireless sensor network performance such as energy efficiency have only been achieved with losses in another area, such as the end-to-end delay.

With Ayyorgun's scheme, however, "all of the colors have started to match," he said. The sensor network was more energy efficient with shorter delay times, and the other performance considerations mentioned earlier have all improved as well.  "The motes communicate randomly, but their random behavior-their genetic code, if you will-has collective intelligence by design," he said. That collective intelligence results in the concurrent performance gains over many aspects, he added.

"We have good colors on all sides, but it's not perfect yet," Ayyorgun said, emphasizing that wireless sensor networks are still in the development stage. Many issues remain to be addressed, just as we are beginning to realize the potential of these "networks of the future."

Ayyorgun acknowledges the support of the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Office at Los Alamos, the Los Alamos Engineering Institute, the Center for Nonlinear Studies, and colleagues, as well as his students.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and Washington Group International for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

Ice scream, you scream...

Being a native California driver I rarely encounter icy road conditions unless I'm on my way to Tahoe to go snowboarding or skiing. I remember the day we had snow in the Bay Area and everyone ran outside to experience the phenomenon (although it only lasted on the ground for a few moments before melting away). In many parts of the world icy road conditions prevail and the ability to easily monitor and detect the danger is not easy due to the harsh environment. However, the idea of pavement condition monitoring would save many a spinning car and screaming driver from sliding on the ice into the side of the road.

Pavement maintenance is vital for travel safety. By using wireless sensor networks to monitor pavement temperature and moisture presence, icy road conditions can be detected. It is essential to provide warnings of dangerous traffic conditions in real-time. In a study done at University of Oklahoma, researchers determined to investigate a densely distributed sensor network and classify pavement conditions into certain categories - 1) dry 2) wet and 3) frozen.

This project was deployed with the MICA2 Motes from Crossbow while integrating them with various 3rd party sensing devices using the MDA100 prototyping board. The ability to integrate 'alien' sensors to the Mote platform gave the researchers the flexibility they needed to complete the task at hand. The sensors chosen to provide the data included a thermistor to gather temperature readings, a leaf sensor to detect the conductivity of a wet pavement to detect the existence of free moisture and an infrared sensor to detect ice by emitting a near infrared light that is reflected by the ice and detected by the infrared receiver (water is transparent to the receiver).

An integrated sensor and road button structure housed the 3 sensors as shown in the figure above. The top surface of the sensor road button contained the moisture and infrared sensors with the thermistor at the bottom. Due to the low power consumption of the sensors used, these devices were powered by the MICA2 Mote platform. The Mote platform was placed into a protective watertight aluminum casing with upgraded antenna doubling the Motes transmitting range.

When collecting readings from the sensors, the Mote transformed them into digitized data, sent them to the radio and waited until all data was sent before switching to sleep mode. In detail, the processor received sensor readings from the embedded 10-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC). If the data was taken correctly, the onboard light emitting diodes (or LEDs) lit up to signal the proper functioning of the mote. Analog to digital conversion was performed on the readings, after which the data was integrated into the packet to be transmitted. The default packet format was slightly modified to fit the size and format of the data to be transmitted. The packet was then sent to the radio and transmitted over the network until it reached the base station. The base station was connected to a laptop through a serial port. The data was then collected using a LabVIEW graphical user interface (GUI) developed for this project. Raw data from the serial port was collected, deciphered and displayed by the GUI.

Using the MICA2 Motes to monitor the pavement conditions is a unique application; therefore, the aforementioned features (directly applying time synchronization and embedding a pattern classification algorithm) further distinguish this study from existing research that utilizes Motes in real-world applications. A series of laboratory tests was conducted at the Asphalt Laboratory at the University of Oklahoma using an environmental chamber to study the effect of temperature and moisture on the sensors (and later, the motes). The environmental chamber was used to produce well-controlled temperature and humidity variations. The sensor-road button unit was tested to (1) test the full functionality when all the sensors were combined together, and (2) collect data to aid refinement and further development of the proposed ice detection algorithm proposed in this application. The entire lab test was completed in a four-hour time frame. Note that weather changes in reality could be much slower than this testing rate; thus such a test could be more stringent than a real-world situation.

A series of outdoor tests were conducted as well paying special attention to the packaging and survivability of fragile analog sensors in harsh roadway conditions and how they will be utilized in other applications of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) as well as structural health monitoring. These methods allowed the Mote wireless sensor network to be easily installed and provided a robust solution to environmental factors such as wind and rain. Imagine a day when roads are 'smart', when you are told exactly what conditions to expect before you encounter a patch of ice. It is this concept and future that we envision with the Mote platforms - a smarter safer future that we all can scream for!

Who needs The Club when you've got SVATS!

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.

Autonomous quadrotor helicopters to the rescue!

What if we could eliminate the need for human intervention in the most dangerous and deadly situations? What if the ability to save a life was not done by endangering the life of another? What if the safety of an area could be determined without the need to send someone in to check the premises? These are a few of the reasons why autonomous vehicles and equipment have become such a fascinating area of development in today's world. The technology available and its integration have brought us closer to the reality of such scenarios occurring not only in a threatening situations across the globe, but in our every day lives whether it be for security and surveillance or search and rescue missions.

Researchers at Stanford University have developed STARMAC (Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control). This research shows how using the current technology available, students have created a multi-vehicle test bed used to demonstrate new concepts in multi-agent control on a real-world platform. The team created a small and light, low cost design which has provided numerous opportunities for innovative work. STARMAC consists of up to eight quadrotor vehicles. The system uses Crossbow's Stargate platform for position estimation and control. The Stargate platform was pre-configured with a compact flash 802.11b WiFi card and field testing revealed significant improvements in communication robustness between the base station and vehicle compared with earlier designs.

The video below highlights the development work being done and the ultimate goal of this type of research:

 

Whether this technology will be used for cinematography allowing aircraft to be flown in more cutting-edge maneuvers to gain better aerial shots than humanly possible, or creating better topographical maps for aerial mapping by flying closer to the ground than is humanly comfortable, or entering devastated areas to assess damage when humanly inaccessible...the list can go on and on. The bottom line is that this type of research and development continues to pave the path to a future where human life could be more protected in situations where it has been endangered in the past.

An ēKo-nomic solution for Nursery Monitoring

If you took a look at the plants in my yard, or had caught a glimpse of the few potted plants I attempted to care for in college it would be quite obvious that my thumbs are not green. The soil would usually be too wet or too dry and the leaves wilted leading to my plant's eventual demise. Imagine having acres and acres of plants to monitor and care for...is there a way to do this ēKo-nomically?

The FLOW-AID project is working to contribute to the sustainability of irrigated agriculture by developing, testing in relevant conditions, and fine-tuning through feedback, an irrigation management system that can be used at farm level in situations where there is limited water supply and water quality. The FLOW-AID project in collaboration with the University of Pisa has installed an ēKo system at an experimental nursery in Tuscany, Italy to monitor soil moisture at eight different locations in the nursery.

The system is designed to serve as an assistant for communication with higher level water management systems at basin scale for long and short term water use planning and prediction. This project integrates innovative sensor technologies into a decision support system for irrigation management while taking into consideration several factors in a number of third country partners. The ēKo nodes have been deployed in eight locations over the nursery in Tuscany. The ēKo ES1101 soil moisture sensors are monitoring the ornamental shrubs and trees being grown to make sure that all the water is being used efficiently and effectively.

The project results yielded will showcase the development and testing of new and innovative, but simple and affordable, technical concepts for irrigation under deficit conditions used at the farm level in a large variety of set-ups and constraints. It will show the development of a water management support system (DSS) that contains an expert system (off-line/long-term) to assist in farm zoning and crop plan in view of expected water availability (amount and quality) with a link to Basin Management, as well as a crop response module that can be incorporated into the irrigation scheduler that allocates available water(s) among several plots and schedules irrigation for each one with a link to Basin Management.

The FLOW-AID project has set up four test sites in various market conditions with different irrigation structures, crop types, local water supplies and constraints. The hardware/software systems used must adapt the general concept of water management to the local situation by using appropriate parts of it at the global sites in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Italy.

The information being collected at the site in Tuscany, Italy, by the researchers at the University of Pisa for container crops and nursery grown crops is available to users over the internet via ēKo's EG2100 gateway device and the ēKoView interface. This device provides, in a fully integrated package the connection between ēKo Sensor Nodes deployed and the ēKo Gateway. The work done by FLOW-AID will be carried out between 2006 and 2009 as a 6th Framework European project under the call for water in agriculture, new systems and technologies for irrigation and drainage. For more information on the ēKo system, click here.

Now that's a bright idea!

Presenting the new 'Ping-pong' Illumimote, a light sensing module for the Crossbow Mote platform. Wireless sensor networks have permeated the market in many sectors such as environmental monitoring, asset tracking, industrial automation, etc. But, these devices have exciting applications in arts, multimedia and entertainment as well. Limited sensing quality, fidelity and diversity of the sensor modules have limited their expansion into areas like film, video production and lighting control. To support research and development in these areas, high-fidelity light sensing modules in a compact form factor are required.

Enter the Ping-Pong Illumimote! This device achieves performance comparable to a commercial light intensity meter, while conforming to the size and energy constraints imposed by its application in wireless sensor networks. The board was developed to replace the light sensing capabilities on the MTS310 Mote sensor board whose response time and narrower dynamic range in light intensity capture is unsuitable to many certain applications for light measurement such as media production. The Illumimote features significantly improved SNR due to its adoption of high-end photo sensors, amplification and conversion circuits coupled with active noise suppression, application-tuned filter networks, and a noise-attentive manual layout. Unlike the MTS310, the Illumimote can capture RGB color intensity (for color temperature calculation) and incident light angle (which discerns the angle of ray arrival from the strongest source). The prototype was created by the UCLA NESL & the UCLA Hypermedia Studio, a joint effort between the film makers and the engineers, to apply wireless sensor networks to new purposes in art and entertainment.



The order in which an audience views a film’s sequence of events is remarkably different from the order in which they are produced. Shots are filmed in the order that minimizes cost and makes best use of actors, crew, and locations. Footage captured at these different times must appear the same when shown consecutively, or differences must be controllable if they are required for creative purposes. It is important to monitor and replicate the quality of light (illuminance and color) in each shot, so that footage captured at different times or in different locations doesn’t show unexpected differences, which may not be perceived by the human eye but affect the film stock. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, was filmed over a year and a half of production and required that footage be captured for use in three different movies with vastly differing release dates and schedules. Researchers at UCLA have focused on lighting instrumentation as the first component of their Advanced Technology for Cinematography (ATC) because of its vital role in the creative process of filmmaking. ATC is a joint project of UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Theater, Film and Television. The Illumimote is part of their larger vision to increase flexibility and creative control in media production using sensor networks and other emerging technologies. Deploying networks of tiny sensors adds a data acquisition layer to the film production environment that supports on-set decision making, such as the lighting adjustment described above, as well as post-production and asset management.

Initial work prompted the development of the Illumimote and other high-quality sensor platforms that can be deployed atop Mica Motes, the defacto standard for WSN nodes. The Illumimote is designed to have equal or better performance to the class of commercial light intensity and color temperature meters used in the entertainment, film and video production industries. It supports three different light sensing modalities: incident light intensity, color intensities and incident light angle (the angle of ray arrival from the strongest source), and two situational sensing modalities: attitude and temperature. The device demonstrated significantly faster response time (> 6x) and a much wider dynamic range (> 10x) in light intensity measurement as compared with the standard MTS310 Mote sensor boards. The light-angle estimation results were well correlated with an average error of just 2.63°. The assembled Illumimote with a lumisphere appears in the picture above. The role of the lumisphere is to protect the sensors and to integrate incident light from all directions.

The overall system architecture diagram of the Illumimote appears below. There are eight light sensor channels allocated based on the number of detector circuits required to capture the illumination attribute. For example, the color temperature unit requires three channels—one for each of red, green, and blue luminosity. Signals from the eight light acquisition units and four situational units are multiplexed via the channel selection unit and presented to the ADC for conversion into a 10-bit digital signal. This resultant data is conveyed to the networked and embedded nodes (in this case, MICAz motes) via either the I2C data bus or a direct 16550Acompatible UART link that uses line-level (rail-to-rail) output. The operation of the Illumimote’s units may be controlled directly from the Mote via the I2C bus or locally by an onboard Atmel Atmega48 microprocessor. Employing the local processor relieves the network interface (mote) of any realtime constraints associated with frame-rate-accurate sampling. The local processor also exposes interrupt facilities both to and from the host-processor onboard the mote. When operating in this mode, the continuous I2C bus may be severed and reattached dynamically (hardware is bus-state aware) to create two isolated buses—one local to the Illumimote, and one local to the Mote—as needed. In addition to calibration functions, the embedded temperature sensor can wake a sleeping mote in the event of a dangerous thermal condition (risk of meltdown). On the bottom, Illumimote features a connector that is compatible with standard Mote-type sensor nodes (IRIS, MICA2, MICAz, Cricket etc).



Three embedded software components were developed for the experimental wireless sensing system. First, sensor and sensitivity control software was programmed and downloaded to the Illumimote board. The board was then attached to a MicaZ node that has a 7.37MHz 8-bit microprocessor and a 250kbps ZigBee radio. Secondly, the Illumimote driver and light sensing application were programmed at the MicaZ mote using SOS environment. SOS is an OS for Mote-class wireless sensor networks developed by NESL at UCLA. Finally, at the base station laptop, a Java program was used to monitor and log the light measurements, and a visualization interface was used for real-time debugging and analysis. A GUI visualization interface was developed as shown below to display the status of the Illumimote in real time, that was used for testing, experimenting, and performing demonstrations. The interface was implemented in Java and Processing. This GUI made it easy to test and evaluate the Illumimotes visually and is a step towards designing the interface that could be used by a cinematographer in future.



The Illumimote achieves performance comparable to a commercial light meter and color meter (as used by professional cinematographers) over the ranges tested. It consists of incident light intensity, RGB intensity (for color temperature calculation capability), and incident light angle sensors as well as thermal and attitudinal sensors. Researchers at UCLA characterized its performance and verified its capabilities. The project website hosts the technical data and the Illumimote will soon be commercially available from Atla Labs to allow other researchers access to the technology for their own experimentation. Future work includes further enhancements to the general characteristics of the Illumimote (such as dynamic range), estimation of the vertical incident light angle, and further development of the software tools that support and integrate the Illumimote in support of its deployment on actual productions scheduled for the near future.

It's not rocket science...or is it?

Motes have been launched into a new dimension. Researchers at NASA Ames Research Center have taken the capabilities of the MICAz Mote platform and sent them to a new level...literally. Wireless sensor networks and Motes are used to monitor environments or objects to detect changes and provide information or alerts about the current configuration in real-time. This time Crossbow's MICAz Mote platform was used in a rocket engine monitoring system.

Unlike most mechanical systems, rocket engines rarely fail gradually. It's not like having your brakes wear out in your car where you can feel the brake pads getting warped. In a rocket engine, if something fails, it happens quickly making it difficult to determine the root cause or to do anything to avoid the failure. When a rocket engine does malfunction, sensor data provides important clues about the cause. The vehicle health monitoring system relays pressure, temperature, voltage, strain and acceleration data back to the Mission/Launch Control Center. Integrated Vehicle Health Monitoring (IVHM) goes a step further by providing onboard processing capability often detecting engine anomalies earlier and responding faster than a ground-linked system.

The goal of the IVHM project is to replace the standard MIL-STD-1553 databus with an 802.15.4 wireless link between groups of sensors and the Stargate flight-data-recorder. The system was used as a platform to demonstrate intra-vehicle wireless transmission and power management software for long duration missions.

The system used wireless pressure sensors with 1 mounted on the engine chamber and 1 on the fuel tank. There were 4 wireless accelerometers distributed through the vehicle and 2 thermocouples for each fuel tank. All the sensors were connected to a MICAz Mote platform as they were able to provide power/control to the sensors. The sensors transmitted their data to the flight-data-recorder based on Crossbow's Stargate platform over the 802.15.4 link as it interfaced with the MICAz. Before the flight test, the equipment was vibe tested to 6.5g rms for 30 seconds on the X, Y and Z axes to mimic the conditions during the space shuttle launch. A piezoelectric buzzer was attached to the Stargate and each sensor board to easily perform diagnostics at the test range. To optimize power management the MICAz Motes were set to go into low-power mode when the flight-data-recorder was powered off and the Stargate was modified to generate a periodic heartbeat data packet. When the MICAz radios did not see the heartbeat they would go into a low-power watchdog routine.

The IVHM system first flew last September onboard the Garvey Spacecraft Corp's P-8A rocket in Mojave, CA. This engine monitoring system is an advanced concept demonstrator for a wireless 802.15.4 databus where stage-separation makes traditional bus architectures difficult. Motes have been used in many environments for many different monitoring requirements but this deployment certainly reached new heights!
 

Intelligent Transportation Systems

When I think about the future of transportation, the image that pops into my mind is the world of the Jetsons - a world of automation and intelligent transportation systems. A place where machines have the ability to sense and understand their surroundings to allow for a safer more efficient transportation environment. With major innovations slowly taking place all around us, we do not realize how quickly Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are becoming part of our every day life. Implementations such as FastTrack to stop delays at bridge tolls, new technology in vehicles such as the Lexus LS 460 with advanced parking guidance so the car can park itself, Land Rover with adjustable suspension TerrainResponse™, or the Infiniti with wireless connectivity...all these innovations lend themselves to creating more intelligence in the transportation sector.

What is an intelligent transportation system? The term refers to efforts to add information and communications technology to transport infrastructure and vehicles in an effort to manage factors that typically are at odds with each other, such as vehicles, loads, and routes to improve safety and reduce vehicle wear, transportation times and fuel consumption. The last few years have seen the emergence of many new technologies that can potentially have major impacts on Intelligent Transportation Systems. A recent study by the UK Governments Office of Science and Innovation, which examined how future intelligent infrastructure would evolve to support transportation over the next 50 years looked at a range of new technologies, systems and services that may emerge over that period. One key class of technology that was identified as having a significant role in delivering future intelligence to the transport sector were wireless sensor networks (Motes) and in particular the fusion of fixed and mobile networks to help deliver a safe, sustainable and robust future transport system based on the better collection of data, its processing and dissemination and the intelligent use of the data in a fully connected environment. Motes can also be augmented with additional sensors – such as those for detecting light, temperature and acceleration – hence enhancing their features and making their application areas virtually limitless. It is generally perceived that Motes will become the low-cost, ubiquitous sensor of the future, especially once its size shrinks dramatically to merit its name.

Researchers at Newcastle University have been at the forefront of looking into the technology challenges of using these small, low-cost and smart wireless sensors in transport and the application areas where they could be employed. It is clear to the ITS community that the emergence of low cost sensors will open up new paradigms in how we can pervasively collect data from sensors, convey information along fixed and mobile low cost wireless networks (partly or fully formed or ad-hoc) and provide a ‘connected environment’ where individuals, vehicles and infrastructure can co-exist and cooperate, thus delivering more knowledge about the transport environment, the state of the network and who indeed is traveling or wishes to travel. This may offer benefits in terms of real-time management, optimization of transport systems, intelligent design and the use of such systems for innovative road charging and possibly carbon trading schemes as well as through the Cooperative Vehicle and Highway Systems for safety and control applications. See the research and potential use of a Mote based wireless sensor network in the video below:

Initial studies suggest vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to infrastructure, and infrastructure to infrastructure communication and in-vehicle monitoring and environmental monitoring may exist for Motes in the transport domain. Over the last few years, many different versions of 'smartdust devices' have been designed and built by various companies and institutions. Such devices can be used to sense a wide range of environmental parameters as well as vehicle speed, vehicle direction and vehicle presence in the infrastructure. Even though there are several platforms available on the market, Newcastle University chose Crossbow's MICA family motes for the EMMA and TRACKSS projects due to its commercial success in many wireless sensor network applications. Also, Newcastle University has successfully used MICA family motes in its other research projects such as the ASTRA project. Low power wireless communication and low power sensing capabilities are essential for sensor network applications which are supported by Crossbow's Mote family.

The ASTRA project investigated the use of mobile ad-hoc networks, and more specifically, Motes for transport applications. The project examined the current state-of-the-art using MICA motes. A trial using Motes technology was hosted in Newcastle with a pervasive intelligent corridor established by a network of fixed Motes on roads near Newcastle Central Station. Mobile Motes were also placed in several buses. Communication between a static node and a moving node on-board a vehicle was achieved, showing that communication can take place between road side and vehicles using a network of Motes. Evaluation of the system revealed that the main limitation of the technology at the present time is battery life. The experiments have demonstrated that Motes can be used for communication between a fixed infrastructure and a moving vehicle up to a speed of 50 mph. Further testing of the devices at higher speeds (60 and 70 mph) to asses the suitability of smartdust/Motes in applications alongside fast moving roads such as a motorway will be conducted.

The focus of the EU funded TRACKSS project is to research advanced communications concepts, open inter operable and scalable system architectures that allow easy upgrading, advanced sensor infrastructure, dependable software, robust positioning technologies and their integration into intelligent co-operative systems to support a range of core functions in the areas of road and vehicle safety and traffic management and control. The overall aim is to develop new systems for cooperative sensing and predict flows, infrastructure and environmental conditions surrounding traffic, with a view to improving road transport safety and efficiency. To support the demonstration phase of the project, Newcastle University will develop a new technology for ‘smart’ detection on vehicles and infrastructure and a common framework for data collection and access from the entire array of sensors being deployed and tested in the TRACKSS project.

In the case of EMMA, the focus is automobiles and their constituent parts, and the infrastructure they utilize (both physical in the sense of roads and the ICT embedded in them for monitoring and control purposes). If we think more widely at present, most of the world’s computing power is already embedded invisibly into the things around us. The personal computers, music players and other gadgets are just the tip of the iceberg. They probably represent no more than 1% of the computing power we have deployed around us. A typical car today will have at least 20 microprocessors and a host of other electronics contributing to the general functionality required by a modern car as well as the ‘value added services’ which may be the unique selling point of a particular vehicle – whether the application, be: better information on how the vehicle is running; safety applications; or infotainment in the vehicle. The Embedded Middleware in Mobility Applications project (EMMA) application domain of transport will be taken as a pilot example where EMMA will foster cost-efficient ambient intelligence systems with optimal performance, high confidence and faster deployment. The MICAz Mote will be the best suitable platform for the EMMA project since it features sensing and networking capabilities with low power consumption.

The EMMA and TRACKSS projects being pursued by Newcastle University are committed to play a major role in creating new possibilities in the future ITS by using Mote technology. For more information on Crossbow's Mote platforms, contact sales or visit our website.

Motes in Antarctica!

Can you imagine a place where the temperature can get to -82°C? A place without sunlight for half the year. Imagine a frozen desert with no permanent human population - the coldest, driest and windiest continent on earth... It is in this place that research scientists from the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have deployed a wireless sensing system using Crossbow's Mote platforms. Being a resident of sunny California I can barely fathom such an environment. If the temperature drops below 50°F (10°C), I want a cup of hot chocolate and a fire to cuddle in front of. Imagine being in a place where the climate is so harsh - there are no plants or animals. Talk about extreme sensing!

China News reported that the wireless sensor network called the 'Unmanned Wireless Intelligent Snow and Ice Observation System in Extreme Environments' has been successfully set up around the Dome-A area near the South Pole, which is the southernmost point on Earth's surface. Dome-A (Dome Argus) is the highest and possibly coldest place in Antarctica and perhaps the coldest naturally occurring place on Earth. It is the highest ice feature in Antarctica, comprising a dome or eminence of 4.093 m elevation.  The system was co-developed by Crossbow Technology and the Chinese Academy of Science to develop a solution that can consistently work under extreme environmental conditions such as a 4-month polar-night, -82°C temperature lows and an annual average temperature of -55°C. The wireless system deployed by CAS scientists is designed to overcome the low-temperature, high-altitude and soft snow-surface.

The deployed system consists of two base stations and four nodes. Each node is powered by two low-temperature resistant batteries which are expected to last for one year. The communication capability between each node can achieve ranges of up to 1000m. Each node samples environmental data every 15 minutes, including temperature (weather temperature, snow temperature and the snow temperature below 1 meter), humidity, sunlight, and air pressure. The collected data is sent wirelessly to the central base station that collects and sends the data to Beijing every day. Meanwhile, the other remote base station is used to store the data locally to be collected later by an expedition team. The two base stations ensure that no data is lost in the communication.

The Antarctic ice sheet where Dr. Xiao and his scientific expedition team ventured is the highest point on the continent. The group hopes to gather vital information on the environment and observing conditions around Dome-A to determine whether or not it is a viable location to expand the observatories in the region. Dome A claims the best astronomical sky conditions in the world, as it is devoid of clouds and boasting steady air that makes for clear viewing. Imagine...Motes in Antarctica!