Crystal-Free Architectures for Smart Dust and the Industrial IoT

摘要

A crystal-free architecture of a low-power wireless node allows for a small and cheap design. The Single-Chip micro Mote (SCuM) is the first crystal-free mote-on-chip to be compatible with standards such as Bluetooth Low Energy and IEEE802.15.4, and develops as a collaboration between Kris Pister’s team at UC Berkeley and Thomas Watteyne’s team at Inria. This keynote will go through our 2019–2020 research journey around the SCuM chip. We start by detailing why a “crystal-free” architecture is such as radical move away from traditional low-power wireless radio design. We discuss the challenges of calibration and compensation in these designs, and show how we get a SCuM chip to communicate with off-the-shelf motes and participate in a standards-based IoT network. We then present an unexpected use case that crystal-free motes enable: tracking Asian hornets as they fly from a beehive back to their nest. We illustrate this presentation with numerous videos and hands-on experience. We finish this talk by discussing why crystal-free micro-robots are the next frontier of IoT research, addressing all open IoT networking research questions at once, which a tremendous potential for pioneering applications such as micro-wearables and swarm robotics. This keynote is tailored to the advanced researcher or engineer in embedded system, IoT and low-power wireless. It draws on recent activities within Inria’s EVA team (team.inria.fr/eva/), UC Berkeley’s Pister lab (bamlab.berkeley.edu) and their collaborative project around crystal-free architectures (www.crystalfree.org).