SMART DUST

Autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic

millimeter
PI: Kris Pister
Co-investigators: Joe Kahn, Bernhard Boser
Subcontract: Steve Morris, MLB Co.

Supported by the DARPA/MTO MEMS program

This project finished in 2001, but many additional projects have grown out of it.  Among
these are

 Berkeley Webs
 NEST
 Center for Embedded and Networked Sensing at UCLA

If you are interested in commercial applications, you should check out Crossbow
Technologies and Dust Networks. (N.b. I have a financial interest in both!)

Quick progress update. Another update.

29 Palms demo of air-emplaced 1" scale motes detecting vehicles.
Latest photos and press coverage.
My view of sensor networks in 2010.

The two figures above represent where we are and where we'd like to be.
On the left is where we hope to be in July of '01 - a cubic millimeter device with a sensor,
power supply, analog circuitry, bidirectional optical communication, and a programmable
microprocessor.  Click on the figure to get more detail.
On the right is where we are now (July '99) - a (currently) non-functional mote with a volume
of about 100 cubic millimeters.  There are two silicon chips sitting on a type-5 hearing aid
battery.  The right chip is a MEMS corner cube optical transmitter array - it works.  On the
right is a CMOS ASIC with an optical receiver, charge pump, and simple digital controller -
it doesn't work (we violated some of the design rules in the 0.25 micron process, but the next
one should work).

Projects

 Laser communication from a cubic millimeter

 Mote Delivery
o Micro Air Vehicles
o Micro Rockets
o Silicon maple seeds and silicon dandelion seeds
 Sub-microWatt Electronics
 Power Sources
 Macro Motes (COTS Dust)

Accomplishments

 Using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components, we've built some really

wonderful little "macro motes".  Some the features:
o temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, light intensity, tilt and vibration,
and magnetic field sensors all in a cubic inch package, including the bi-
directional radio, the microprocessor controller, and the battery!
o 20 meter communication range
o one week lifetime in continuous operation, 2 years with 1% duty cycling
 21 km laser communication (Coit Tower and Twin Peaks in San Francisco to Cory
Hall at UC Berkeley)
o Using one of the micro-weather stations, we stripped off the radio and wired in
a laser pointer.  This went to SF.  In my office at Cal we had a video camera
hooked up to a frame grabber in my laptop.  The software looked for (and
decoded) flashing lights in the image, and gave us the weather information 21
km away.
 Large angle MEMS beam-steering
o The laser motes above need to be aimed.  We've made a sub-millimeter mirror
coupled to two motors on the same silicon chip.  The motors can scan a
reflected laser beam tens of degrees in either direction.
 Micro Air Vehicle endurance record
o Sub-contractor Steve Morris of MLB Co has built an 8" radio controlled plane
which flys 60mph for 18 minutes and can carry a color video camera with a
live video feed.
 Silicon maple seeds
o Using a honeycombed layer of silicon only 0.1 mm thick we have made a
3x10 mm winglet.  With a cubic millimeter of silicon attached, these wings
auto-rotate as they fall, just like a maple seed.  The next generation will have
 solar cells built right in. (ok this generation had the solar cells too, but they
didn't work!)

Applications
The science/engineering goal of the Smart Dust project is to demonstrate that a complete
sensor/communication system can be integrated into a cubic millimeter package.  This
involves both evolutionary and revolutionary advances in miniaturization, integration, and
energy management.  We aren't targeting any particular sensor, in fact there is no direct
funding for sensor research in the project (but we've got quite a few to choose from based on
a decade or two of outstanding MEMS work at Berkeley and elsewhere).
We're funded by DARPA, so we will demonstrate Smart Dust with one or more applications
of military relevance.  In addition, we're pursuing several different applications with
commercial importance, and we've got a long list of applications to work on if we only had
the time.  Here's a sampling of some possible applications, in no particular order:

 Defense-related sensor networks

o battlefield surveillance, treaty monitoring, transportation monitoring, scud
hunting, ...
 Virtual keyboard
o Glue a dust mote on each of your fingernails.  Accelerometers will sense the
orientation and motion of each of your fingertips, and talk to the computer in
your watch.  QWERTY is the first step to proving the concept, but you can
imagine much more useful and creative ways to interface to your computer if
it knows where your fingers are: sculpt 3D shapes in virtual clay, play  the
piano, gesture in sign language and have to computer translate, ...
o Combined with a MEMS augmented-reality heads-up display, your entire
computer I/O would be invisible to the people around you.  Couple that with
wireless access and you need never be bored in a meeting again!  Surf the web
while the boss rambles on and on.
 Inventory Control
o The carton talks to the box, the box talks to the palette, the palette talks to the
truck, and the truck talks to the warehouse, and the truck and the warehouse
talk to the internet.  Know where your products are and what shape they're in
any time, anywhere.  Sort of like FedEx tracking on steroids for all products in
your production stream from raw materials to delivered goods.
 Product quality monitoring
o temperature, humidity monitoring of meat, produce, dairy products
 Mom, don't buy those Frosted Sugar Bombs, they sat in 80% humidity
for two days, they won't be crunchy!
o impact, vibration, temp monitoring of consumer electronics
 failure analysis and diagnostic information, e.g. monitoring vibration
of bearings for frequency signatures indicating imminent failure (back
up that hard drive now!)
 Smart office spaces
o The Center for the Built Environment has fabulous plans for the office of the
future in which environmental conditions are tailored to the desires of every
individual.  Maybe soon we'll all be wearing temperature, humidity, and
 environmental comfort sensors sewn into our clothes, continuously talking to
our workspaces which will deliver conditions tailored to our needs.  No more
fighting with your office mates over the thermostat.
 Interfaces for the Disabled (courtesy of Bryndis Tobin)
o Bryndis sent me email with the following idea: put motes "on a quadriplegic's
face, to monitor blinking & facial twitches - and send them as commands to a
wheelchair/computer/other device."  This could be generalized to a whole
family of interfaces for the disabled.  Thanks Bryndis!
 The dark side
o Yes, personal privacy is getting harder and harder to come by.  Yes, you can
hype Smart Dust as being great for big brother (thank you, New Scientist).
Yawn.  Every technology has a dark side - deal with it. [this was my original
comment on "dark side" issues, but it made a lot of people think that we
weren't thinking about these issues at all.  Not true.]
o As an engineer, or a scientist, or a hair stylist, everyone needs to evaluate what
they do in terms of its positive and negative effect.  If I thought that the
negatives of working on this project were larger than or even comparable to
the positives, I wouldn't be working on it.  As it turns out, I think that the
potential benefits of this technology far far outweigh the risks to personal
privacy.

Environmental Impact
A lot of people seem to be worried about environmental impact.  Not to worry!  Even in my
wildest imagination I don't think that we'll ever produce enough Smart Dust to bother
anyone.  If Intel stopped producing Pentia and produced only Smart Dust, and you spread
them evenly around the country, you'd get around one grain-of-sand sized mote per acre per
year.  If by ill chance you did inhale one, it would be just like inhaling a gnat.  You'd cough it
up post-haste. Unpleasant, but not very likely.
Consider the scale - if I make a million dust motes, they have a total volume of one liter. 
Throwing a liter worth of batteries into the environment is certainly not going to help it, but
in the big picture it probably doesn't make it very high on the list of bad things to do to the
planet.

Presentations/reports

 Kickoff slides from MEMS PI meeting, June 98 (ppt w/ annotations, html conversion)
 Presentation at MEMS PI meeting, July 99 (ppt w/ annotations, html conversion)
 Packet radio powerpoint presentations by Randy Katz from summer 99 internal
meetings (intro, route, adv)
 MOEMS presentation by Matt Last, August 99, Smart Dust Agile Laser Transceiver
(SALT) (ppt, html)
 Presentation at MEMS DoD-wide meeting, January 00 (ppt w/ annotations)

Publications
Overview:

 R. Yeh, R. Conant, K. Pister, "Mechanical Digital-to-Analog Converter", Transducers

99, (PDF)
 M. Last, K. Pister, "2DOF Actuated Micromirror Designed for Large DC Deflection",
MOEMS 99, (PDF)
 J. M. Kahn, R. H. Katz and K. S. J. Pister, "Mobile Networking for Smart Dust",
ACM/IEEE Intl. Conf. on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 99),
Seattle, WA, August 17-19, 1999. (Postscript/ PDF)
 K. S. J. Pister, J. M. Kahn and B. E. Boser, "Smart Dust: Wireless Networks of
Millimeter-Scale Sensor Nodes", Highlight Article in 1999 Electronics Research
Laboratory Research Summary. (postscript, PDF)
 V. Hsu, J. M. Kahn, and K. S. J. Pister, "Wireless Communications for Smart Dust",
Electronics Research Laboratory Technical Memorandum Number M98/2, February,
1998. (postscript / PDF)

The early work on corner cubes at UCLA:

 Chu, P.B., Lo, N.R., Berg, E., Pister, K.S.J, "Optical Communication Link Using
Micromachined Corner Cuber Reflectors", Proc. SPIE vol.3008-20. (postscript)
 Chu, P.B., Lo, N.R., Berg, E., Pister, K.S.J, "Optical Communication Using Micro
Corner Cuber Reflectors", MEMS 97, Nagoya, Japan, 26-30 Jan 1997, pp. 350-5.
(postscript)

Dust People

 Bryan Atwood
 Colby Bellew
 Lance Doherty
 Seth Hollar
 Matt Last
 Brian Leibowitz
 Wei Mao
 Lilac Muller
 Junichi Nishimoto
 Dana Teasdale
 Brett Warneke
 Xiaoming Zhu

Corny dust photo

Mobile dust animation Free-Space
Optical Communication using
Microelectromechanical Systems
This research has had two main thrusts.

In the first thrust, we have collaborated with K.S.J. Pister of U.C. Berkeley to investigate
distributed networks of millimeter-scale sensing elements implemented using MEMS, which
we call "Smart Dust". Smart Dust might be deployed in an outdoor or indoor environment to
sense and record data of interest. Each dust mote will contain a power source, sensors, data
storage, and a bidirectional wireless modem. A collection of dust motes can be interrogated at
a distance up to several hundred meters by a hand-held central transceiver. We are currently
working to implement free-space optical communications for interrogation of Smart Dust. A
novel uplink design utilizes a micro corner-cube retroreflector on each dust mote, which is
illuminated from the central transceiver, permitting dust motes to transmit information
without having to radiate any power.

In the second thrust, we have collaborated with researchers at U.C. Berkeley (K.Y. Lau),
Stanford (O. Solgaard), Princeton (S.R. Forrest) and Sensors Unlimited (M.J. Cohen) in a
project funded by the DARPA Steered Agile Beams (STAB) Program. We are developing
system architectures and novel components for high-speed, free-space optical communication
between fast-moving airplanes and ground vehicles. Components under development include:
high-power (1-5 W) InGaAsP/InP lasers, two-axis beam scanners fabricated in MEMS
technology, and a dual-mode InGaAs focal-plane array capable of both high-resolution
imaging and reception of signals modulated at high bit rates (100-1000 Mb/s). In order to
enable rapid link acquisition, we have devised an optimized communication protocol that
exploits these high-performance components.

MEMS Devices for Free-Space Optical Communication

L. Zhou, J. M. Kahn and K. S. J. Pister, "Scanning Micromirrors Fabricated by an SOI/SOI Wafer

Bonding Process", IEEE J. of Microelectromech. Syst., vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 24-32, February 2006. PDF

L. Zhou, M. Last, V. Milanovic, J. M. Kahn, K. S. J. Pister, "Two-Axis Scanning Mirror for

Free-Space Optical Communication between UAVs", Proc. of IEEE Conference on Optical
MEMS, Waikoloa, HI, August 18-21, 2003. PDF

L. Zhou, J. M. Kahn and K. S. J. Pister, "Corner-Cube Retroreflectors Based on Structure-

Assisted Assembly for Free-Space Optical Communication", IEEE J. of
Microelectromechanical Syst., vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 233-242, June 2003. PDF

L. Zhou, K. S. J. Pister and J. M. Kahn, "Assembled Corner-Cube Retroreflector

Quadruplet", Proc. of 15th IEEE Intl. Conf. on MicroElectroMechanical Systems, Las Vegas,
NV, January 20-24, 2002. PDF

X. Zhu, V. S. Hsu and J. M. Kahn, "Optical Modeling of MEMS Corner Cube Retroreflectors
with Misalignment and Non-flatness", IEEE J. on Sel. Topics in Quantum Electron., vol. 8,
no. 1, pp. 26-32, January/February 2002. PDF

V. Hsu, "MEMS Corner Cube Retroreflectors for Free-Space Optical Communications", M.

S. Report, University of California, Berkeley, November 1999. PDF

Communication and Networking Architectures for Smart Dust

W. Mao and J. M. Kahn, "Free-space Heterochronous Imaging Reception of Multiple Optical Signals",
IEEE Trans. on Commun., vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 269-279, February 2004. PDF

B. A. Warneke, M. D. Scott, B. S. Liebowitz, L. Zhou, C. L. Bellew, J. A. Chediak, J. M.

Kahn, B. E. Boser and K. S. J. Pister, "An Autonomous 16 mm3 Solar-Powered Node for
Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks", Proc. of IEEE Sensors 2002 Conference, Orlando,
FL, June 12-14, 2002. PDF

J. M. Kahn, R. H. Katz, and K. S. J. Pister, "Emerging Challenges: Mobile Networking for

Smart Dust", J. of Commun. and Networks, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 188-196, September 2000
(Invited Paper). PDF

J. M. Kahn, R. H. Katz and K. S. J. Pister, "Mobile Networking for Smart Dust", Proc. of
ACM/IEEE Intl. Conf. on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 99), Seattle, WA,
August 17-19, 1999. (Voted Best Paper in Session.) PDF

Free-Space Optical Communication using Steered Agile Beams

J. M. Kahn, "Secure Free-Space Optical Communication Between Moving Platforms", Proc. of IEEE
Lasers and Electro-Optics Society Annual Meeting, Glasgow, Scotland, November 10-14, 2002
(Invited Paper). PDF

J. Wang, J. M. Kahn and K. Y. Lau "Minimization of Acquisition Time in Short-Range Free-

Space Optical Communication", Applied Optics, vol. 41, no. 12, pp. 7592-7602, December
2002. PDF

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Last modified: April 28, 2006.