In 2035, Sergeant Bill Traverse and his commandos are performing a "cleaning" mission in the war-torn Mexico City. Their goal is to find sporadic resistance and eliminate it completely.
In the winding city streets, the drone does not help. In such a city that was baptized by war, the technological infrastructure was completely destroyed a few years ago, so the HUD (head-up display) equipped by the soldiers was completely useless.
But Travos did not act blindly. He and his team members have a secret weapon called Dust. This is actually a portable sensor that can float in the air of the entire city and collect a variety of useful information, including the movement of objects, biometric information, temperature changes, and chemical composition.
The commando has a soldier dedicated to carrying a communication receiver, which can send the information collected by the "dust" sensor back to the HUD. Through these data, Travos can determine whether there are people at the next corner and whether those people carry weapons, thus helping his team members make accurate judgments ...
Of course, the scene that Travos and his men face is purely fictional, and "dust" does not exist.
Smart dust: sensors that track everything anytime, anywhere
Although the Internet of Things has not yet been fully implemented, this topic seems to be old-fashioned. The core concept of the Internet of Things is to put sensors on anything, and then send the data back to the database through the Internet. In this way, you can monitor all information anytime, anywhere, and build a smarter and more interactive system.
Put the sensor on the object? It's too creative. But what if you spread the sensor in the air? In this way, they can monitor everything-temperature, humidity, chemicals, exercise, brain waves, everything.
This technology is called "smart dust". Although it sounds crazy and novel, it is not as crazy as you think.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the US Department of Defense and RAND Corporation proposed the concept of "smart dust" in the early 1990s. The reason why we fabricated the above military scene is because it was first proposed by these military agencies.
But from a practical point of view, this technology can be applied to almost all walks of life. The “dust†on the battlefield can monitor the enemy ’s every move, the “dust†in the factory can monitor the operation of the machine, the “dust†in the body can monitor the health of people, the dust in the forest can track the migration of wild animals and Wind and humidity.
With this ubiquitous sensor technology, the entire world can be quantified. But what exactly does the specific working model look like?
What is "smart dust"?
"Smart dust" is composed of "particulate", its essence is a miniature sensor with many functions. Such sensors need to be implemented with the aid of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). The US market research company Gartner described the function of these particles in the report:
"A typical smart dust particle usually contains a conductor laser diode and a MEMS beam control mirror for active light transmission; a MEMS corner cube prism retroreflector for passive light transmission; an optical receiver, signal processing and control Wiring; and a power source made of thick-film batteries and solar cells. "
The reason why "smart dust" can become a reality depends on the development of these MEMS, digital circuits and wireless communication technology. Advances in digital circuit systems can significantly reduce the size of these "particulates", but batteries, memory, and wireless transmitters can still be built in. It is possible to use radio frequency identification (RFID), Bluetooth, or wireless communication protocols that have not yet been launched. The goal is to reduce the size as much as possible, extend the battery life as much as possible, and at the same time run the micro operating system to achieve various functions.
The challenge of "smart dust" is to not only fully integrate various sensors, but also transmit data back to the base station. Kristofer Pister, Joe Kahn, and Bernhard Boser of the University of California, Berkeley have discussed the use of optical transmission and radio to implement data transmission and reception.
Pister is one of the top researchers and supporters of "smart dust", as well as the co-founder and CTO of Dust Network. The company founded in 2004 hopes to turn "smart dust" from concept to reality. The company was acquired by integrated circuit company Linear Networks in 2011.
Control "dust" with TInyOS
If developers want to develop a variety of open source hardware and software, it is likely to use one of the two operating platforms Arduino and TInyOS.
The main difference between Arduino and TInyOS is that the latter is designed for low-energy sensors and can support wireless transmission standards. Arduino is easier to learn and use, but TInyOS provides more comprehensive functions. Therefore, TinyOS can be said to be the perfect choice for designing "smart dust" particles.
Stanford University completed most of the development of TinyOS. They described the model of this system on the official website: "TinyOS is an open source operating system designed for low-energy wireless devices, including sensor networks, pervasive computing, personal area networks, smart buildings and smart meters. TinyOS is the underlying hardware Useful software is provided. "
The main disadvantage of TinyOS is that it cannot run functions that require high-performance support. Although TinyOS is a fully functional operating system, its purpose is very strong. It uses very short code snippets to run a single task without using long code to achieve more complex actions. This also makes it very suitable for the functional requirements of "smart dust", so as to achieve high-frequency data collection and transmission, but does not need to support the base station as a special data collection facility.
"Dust" world
Many technologies created specifically for war have brought huge technological breakthroughs to mankind. Nuclear power, jet engines, radar and the Internet were originally for military purposes. The same is true of "dust", but this does not mean that it can only be applied to the military field.
The above fictional sergeant Travos and his commandos have been fabricated for convenience, but we hope this will never happen. We hope to use this technology to carry out interplanetary exploration: use "dust" to monitor the environment on a planet that may be suitable for human habitation, or monitor the internal working mechanism of the human brain.
In the paper on "smart dust", Pist and Kahn described some possible application areas: "'smart dust' may be deployed in a region to record local meteorological, geographic or planetary research data. It even Data can be measured in environments where wired sensors cannot be used or have errors. For example, semiconductor devices, rotating electrical machines, wind tunnels, and anechoic chambers. In biological research, 'smart dust' may also be used to monitor insects or other small animals. Sports or internal processes. "
Pistre and Kahn may have only introduced the tip of the iceberg of "smart dust". This kind of particles may soon drift around the world with the wind to quantify the entire world.
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