SMCS e-Newsletter

A group of graduate students from The Center for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems (CSOIS), Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Utah State University (USU) won the 2nd place of the Smart Dust Competition on Feb. 11, 2005 in the campus of University of California at Berkeley as part of the International TinyOS Technology Exchange II . The announcement of the top 5 finalists can be found here. The final press release for this first smart dust competition is here. The CSOIS submitted entry is on the "Task-Oriented Mobile Actuator and Sensor Networks" described in detail in 4 posters (slide-1, slide-2). The task-oriented mobile actuator sensor networks (MAS-net) is a long term project with emphases on 1) synergy of the latest wireless sensor network technology with ground mobile robot technology, and 2) how to instill the optimal spatially and temporally moving sampling and actuation behaviors such as chemotaxis, phototaxis etc. into the MAS-net to best characterize and/or mitigate the concerned distributed parameter system such as diffusion process or structural health monitoring etc. Currently, we have built Intel mote based MAS-net platform for diffusion monitoring/characterization of nontoxic stage fog. When considering chemical neutralization of the possibly toxic fog using the same mobility platform, called "mobile actuator", the theoretical challenge is huge and there are a lot of high-level research opportunities especially when issues of formation motion, packet losses, communication channel capacity limit, among many others, are to be considered. This platform is also uniquely effective for mobile wireless sensor network research. (Feb. 25, 2005. Prepared by Dr. YangQuan Chen, the Acting Director of CSOIS)