Integrated Sensing: Towards Sensate Media and Electronic Skins - Testbeds For Very High Density Distributed Sensor Networks

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

A pair of testbeds will be built to study the behavior of very dense sensor networks. The first involves constructing small sensor nodes in the form of a pushpin, having a pair of insulated-jacket conductive pins that provide power to the nodes when they are pushed into a large piece of laminated conductive wallboard. The nodes couple to their immediate neighbors via local communication once inserted, and form an ad-hoc network across the wallboard. The wallboard substrate will accommodate relatively large numbers (e.g., over 100) of these pushpins, and they can be trivially reconfigured, essentially as one would move tacks about on a bulletin board, allowing different network densities and geometries to be easily investigated. Likewise, the pushpins themselves have a configurable, layered structure, allowing the processor, communications system, and sensor suite to be easily swapped. Our second testbed will push these ideas towards the concept of a multisensory electronic "skin" - a sheet of material with circa 100 or more processor/sensor nodes, now spaced significantly closer than a centimeter to one another. The processors will talk to their neighbors to reject background while isolating and parameterizing sensor stimuli and routing the results peer-peer to external connections at the network's perimeter. In order to scale gracefully, most data reduction (feature clustering, detection, parameterization, etc.) must be done by the network itself, using regional communication. Accordingly, these testbeds are useful for exploring and developing new kinds of self-organizing and physics-inspired algorithms to reduce and process the data locally on the network