Stanford engineer aims to connect the world with ant-sized radios

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/september/ant-radio-arbabian-090914.html?utm_content=bufferaae5e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

by sterlingwes • 12 years ago

103 36 12 years ago

news.stanford.edu

morenoh149• 12 years ago

I'd like to know more about how it's powered. Didn't see anything on that. Seems like it's powered by proximity to that purple square.

XorNot• 12 years ago

They say it's energy scavenging - like passive NFC tags essentially.

tkinom• 12 years ago

Agree, the whole demo looks like an passive NFC tag.

What's new here?

Bud• 12 years ago

That's explained in the article: "a receiving antenna that also scavenges energy from incoming electromagnetic waves".

otakucode• 12 years ago

This sounds almost exactly like amorphous computing... but not. Was that bit just left out of the article? Is the intention that these chips will be used one-at-a-time and perform significant computation onboard rather than (as with amorphous computing) having computation be an emergent property of the internetworking of many such chips?

jfoutz2• 12 years ago

This is going to sound a little harsh, but that's not the intention. I am genuinely curious about emergent phenomenon of computation.

I spent a lot of time messing around with toy evolutionary algorithms. I never really got any satisfaction out of those experiments. eventually I found this [1], and felt sort of foolish.

Has anything really happened with emergent properties in the last 10 years or so?

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/

farmerjack2• 12 years ago

I've never seen emergence "used as an explanation in its own right." I also don't understand why you would feel foolish after reading this.

ridgeguy• 12 years ago

These seem like the beginnings of the localizers in Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, or maybe his earlier Fast Times at Fairmont High.

TheMagicHorsey• 12 years ago

The Larson Localizers?

In the story those nodes were compute, storage, and transport. As well as interface.

Amazing tech.

I would be interested in trading for a sample, or better yet, the specs of the industrial base necessary to manufacture them.

storrgie• 12 years ago

Came here to say this.

hcarvalhoalves• 12 years ago

A light bulb I can control is nice, but one that anyone can control doesn't seem very useful. How does one implement security on top, since this is passive?

icebraining• 12 years ago

The article says it has a CPU, therefore in theory it can check digital signatures.

That said, I don't see why would it need to be passive if it's in a light bulb, or any other device that can be actuated. It'll need more energy to do whatever you tell it to, so it can also use that energy to actively power the CPU.

grendelt• 12 years ago

"What is this? A radio for ants?" "I don't wanna hear your excuses! The radio has to be at least... three times bigger than this!"

pkaye• 12 years ago

What is this... a radio for ants? But seriously speaking, at the frequencies used, I'm guessing it is meant for some bluetooth application?

induscreep• 12 years ago

Comparing with existing wireless sensor network "motes", this is much much smaller - but do it's processing/networking capabilities match those of motes?

chubot• 12 years ago

Is it programmable? That is, does it have CPU/memory? The article wasn't clear on this.

bravo223• 12 years ago

It is a very cool development but I see couple of issues with it:

1 - It works at about 60GHz. You are not getting a lot of distance or even going through a wall at that frequency and (likely) very low power levels

2 - The devices still need a central "base station". Presumably they rebroadcast to neighbouring nodes; but at lower power levels since they reuse some of the received power for themselves. I doubt you'd get more than 2 - 3 hops out before you don't have much power to begin with.

3 - He cites including these in fridges, coffee makers, light bulbs, etc. None of these are power constrained applications. You can put in $0.45 802.15.4 chip in them TODAY and it comes with a whole microcontroller inside to do what you want to do.

The tech here is no doubt "cool" but I don't see any applicability for IoT. If anything I think it would have some medical uses in pills you can swallow etc. But IoT use is kind of a dud.

Most IoTs have pretty good power source and you can run the w/ existing chipsets.

ars• 12 years ago

Presumably they rebroadcast to neighbouring nodes;

Unless you have a directional antenna, which these don't, you can not possibly scavenge power and simultaneously hope to increase the range by rebroadcasting.

So rebroadcasting is pointless, these simply communicate with the base station.

But what do they do? I mean it's nice to communicate, but you have to have something to say.

bradfa2• 12 years ago

The power scavenging circuit looks to not be the same frequency as the communications radio circuit due to antenna size differences. Likely it's harvesting power from 2.4 GHz or similar frequency and then using the higher (24 GHz-ish) band for comms. With a decent meshing protocol this would be quite interesting, although latency with many many short hops will be horrid.

bravo223• 12 years ago

I agree about scavenging. It is inefficient and doesn't make much sense.. They're likely rebroadcasting but at a much much lower power level so the next hop is much closer than the first.

bradfa2• 12 years ago

Article says: The antenna had to be small, one-tenth the size of a Wi-Fi antenna, and operate at the incredibly fast rate of 24 billion cycles per second.

Sounds like 24 GHz. But all your critiques are still very valid.

But if you can blanket the world with these kinds of radios and mesh them, think 10s or 100s of trillions of radios, then the range issues are less of a concern but you have a chicken and egg problem which needs many many billions of dollars of investment to kickstart. Great reason for IPv6, though :)

redwood• 12 years ago

Think sewers etc

userbinator• 12 years ago

Now Arbabian envisions networks of these radio chips deployed every meter or so throughout a house (they would have to be set close to one another because high-frequency signals don't travel far).

The whole concept is a bit creepy, but that particular sentence stood out. It's not hard to envision these tiny devices all having microphones and cameras... the Internet of Things That Watch You seems not far off.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

Microphony in radio circuits is pretty much a given so even if there is no overt microphone every one of these will exhibit a frequency shift when hit by sound waves and that shift is detectable.

Hm. This makes me wonder if you could recover audio from wifi signals.

Stwerp3• 12 years ago

Maybe you can describe this a bit more. The Great Seal Bug was used for wireless audio recording in the 40's, but this operated by using a microphone/cavity to modulate the load of an antenna; thereby embedding audio in the reflected fields.

Bell did a similar demonstration in the 1890s using a mirror to embed reflections in ambient light and demonstrated wireless audio transmission over 200 meters.

However, I'm not sure why audio would cause a frequency shift in a radio circuit. Perhaps you are meaning the antenna will be perturbed and that could possibly be recovered? I'd be interested to know.

tim333• 12 years ago

You'd think it might work better if they had a bit of wire attached as an arial. Then they could use lower frequencies, get more range and so on, perhaps? Having mucked about connecting bits of wire to oscilloscopes it seems most of the signal that you could use to power something is 50/60Hz picked up from the mains. It would still cost cents given a bit of wire is not terribly expensive.

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

Isn't this an RFID tag? What makes it different?

janekm• 12 years ago

I've just read the paper; it's academically very cool yet practically useless (at least for now). It uses 24GHz for RX, 60GHz for TX so retransmission is just a fantasy of the "journalist". It requires +45dBm output power (32watts!) at the Basestation to power it at 50cm range, so less practical than regular RFID for now really (and absolutely no chance of ever working as a mesh).

Stwerp3• 12 years ago

45 dBm is crazy! Do you know the FCC limitations for that frequency? For the ISM bands its +36 dBm EIRP maximum. I'm not familiar with the rules for the higher GHz frequencies.

Stanford engineer aims to connect the world with ant-sized radios

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