Micro-motes are a breakthrough technology which offers communication and computation capabilities in a single-chip design the size of a grain of rice. Our long-term vision is to use micromotes at the heart of micro-robots to form swarms of coordinated ant-sized micro-robots. These swarms can carry out missions in small and hard-to-reach places. One example is exploring and mapping the internal structure of a collapsed building after an earthquake. A micro-mote has no stable crystal oscillator, only an unstable internal oscillating circuit. This requires us to completely re-think time-keeping by using the network as a time source. This research changes the foundations of lowpower wireless and opens up new research domains on micro-motes and micro-robots.
UC PI:
Kris Pister
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley
France PI:
Thomas Watteyne
EVA Team, INRIA Paris