Smart dust: Sensors that track everything anywhere

Tencent Science and Technology long song compiled in 2035, Bill Travos (Bill Traverse) Sergeant and his commandos are carrying out a "clean-up" mission in the war-torn Mexico City, their goal is to find sporadic resistance to remove it completely. In the winding city streets, drones do little to help. In such a war-torn city, the technology infrastructure was destroyed a few years ago, so the HUD of the soldiers was completely out of the play. But the Tesla did not act blindly. He and his players have a secret weapon called "Dust" (dust). It's actually a portable sensor that floats through the air in the city and collects all kinds of useful information, including movement of objects, biometric information, temperature changes, and chemical compositions. Commando has a soldier specially carries the communication receiver, may send the information which "the Dust" sensor collects to return to the HUD. With this data, Tesla can determine if anyone is on the next corner, and whether those people are carrying weapons to help his teammates make accurate judgments ... Of course, the scenes that Tesla and his men face are fictitious, and "dust" does not exist. Smart dust: The sensor network that tracks everything anywhere is not fully implemented, but the topic seems to be old fashioned. The core idea of the Internet of things is to put sensors on anything and then send the data back to the database over the Internet. In this way, you can monitor all information anytime, anywhere, and build smarter and more interactive systems. Put the sensor on the object? Too creative. But what if you spread the sensor into the air? So they can monitor everything-temperature, humidity, chemicals, sports, brain waves, everything. The technology, called "smart Dust", sounds crazy and novel, but it's not as crazy as you think. The United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Program (DARPA) and the RAND Corporation early in the 1990 's introduced the concept of "smart dust." We invented the above military scene because it was first made by these military agencies. But from a practical point of view, this technology can be applied to all walks of life. "Dust" on the battlefield can monitor the enemy's movements, the factory "Dust" can monitor the operation of the machine, the body of the "dust" can monitor the health of people, the forest dust can track the migration of wildlife and wind and humidity. With this ubiquitous sensor technology, the whole world can be quantified. But what is the specific mode of work? What is "smart dust"? "Smart dust" is made up of "particles", which is essentially a miniature sensor with many functions. The sensor needs to be realized by means of a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS). U.S. market research firm Gartner describes the functions of these particles in its report: "A typical smart dust particle usually contains a guideThe body laser diode and a MEMS beam control mirror for active optical transmission; a MEMS angle prism injector for passive optical transmission; a light receiver, signal processing and control circuit, and a power supply made of thick-film batteries and solar cells. "Smart dust" can become a reality, thanks to these MEMS, as well as digital circuits and wireless communication technology development. Advances in digital circuits can drastically reduce the size of these "particles", but can still be built into batteries, memory and wireless transmitters, possibly using radio frequency identification (RFID), or possibly using Bluetooth or a wireless protocol that has not yet been launched. The goal is to minimize the volume, extend as much as possible, and run the micro operating system to achieve a variety of functions. The challenge of "smart dust" is to integrate all kinds of sensors and send data back to the base station. Christopher Pister (Kristofer pister), Chow Karn (Joe Kahn), and Bohad Bosseux (Bernhard boser), of the University of California, Berkeley, have discussed the use of optical transmission and radio to send and receive data. Pi is one of the top researchers and supporters of "smart Dust" and co-founder and CTO of Dust Receptacle Inc. The company, founded in 2004, hopes to turn "smart dust" from the idea into reality. The company was acquired by IC company Linear NX in 2011. Using TinyOS to control "dust" if developers want to develop various open-source hardware and software, it is likely to use one of the two Arduino and TinyOS platforms. The main difference between Arduino and TinyOS is that the latter is designed for low-power sensors and can support wireless transmission standards. Arduino is easier to learn and use, but TinyOS provides more comprehensive functionality. So TinyOS can be said to be the perfect choice for designing "smart dust" particles. Stanford University completed most of the TinyOS development. They described the system's model on the official web site: "TinyOS is an Open-source operating system designed for Low-power wireless devices, including sensor networks, pervasive computing, personal LANs, smart buildings and smart meters." TinyOS provides useful software for the underlying hardware. "The main disadvantage of TinyOS is that it does not run functions that require high-performance support." Although TinyOS is a full-featured operating system, its purpose is very strong. It uses very short snippets of code to run a single task without using long code to implement more complex actions. This also makes it very suitable for "smart dust" functional requirements, so as to achieve high frequency data collection and transmission, but does not need to support the base station such a dedicated data collection facilities. "Dust" Many of the world's technology created for the war has brought great technological breakthroughs for mankind. Nuclear power, jet engines, radar and the Internet were initiallyFor military purposes. The same is true of "dust", but that does not mean that it can only be used in the military field. Sergeant Tesla and his commandos were invented to facilitate the narrative, but we hope this never happens. We would also like to use this technology to carry out interstellar exploration: using "dust" to monitor the environment or monitor the workings of the human brain within a planet that may be habitable. Pi and Mr. Strauss-Kahn described some possible areas of application in the paper on "Smart Dust": "Smart dust" may be deployed to a region to record local meteorological, geographic or planetary research data. It can even measure data in an environment where a wired sensor cannot be used or an error occurs. such as semiconductor equipment, rotary motors, wind tunnels and silencing chambers. In biological research, ' smart dust ' may also be used to monitor the movement or internal processes of insects and other small animals. "Pi and Mr Strauss-Kahn may have only introduced the tip of the" smart dust ", a particle that could soon drift across the globe and quantify the world.