Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)

Research Advised by Professor Kristofer S.J. Pister

Pister Group:  List of Projects | List of Researchers

BPN561: Sensors and Capability Modeling for Palm-Sized Flying Robots

Anita Flynn
2010

Recent breakthroughs in understanding insect flight have led to increased interest in small robotic flying aircraft which can hover and navigate through cluttered environments. MEMS inertial sensors have been an enabler in this regard. What types of additional sensors are required for autonomous flight and of what sorts of behaviors could palm-sized fliers be capable? We are performing a Multidisciplinary Design Optimization, combining constraints of propulsive technologies, powertrain efficiencies, novel sensors and communication drop-off payload to understand this space. The...

BPN558: 16-Channel IEEE802.15.4 Packet Sniffer

Boyang Zhang
Thomas Watteyne
2010

The goal of this project is to build a multi-channel sniffer capable of listening on all available channels at the same time, and which can interpret the packets it receives. In its current state, 16 Atmel IEEE802.15.4 radios are driven by software capable of parsing packets into a user defined format. A front end graphical user interface displays the content of the received packets. Frequency-agile protocols for low power wireless sensor networks, such as IEEE802.15.4E or WirelessHART, use channel hopping to increase the robustness of the wireless link. In these networks, packets...

BPN479: Protocol-Agnostic Compression in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (PACMAN)

Travis Massey
2010

Compression of packets in wireless sensor networks and mobile ad-hoc networks is of great interest because of the substantial opportunities for power and bandwidth savings. The method of compression discussed here is protocol agnostic, meaning that it operates with any combination of MAC, NET, TRAN, and APP layer protocols in an IEEE 802.15.4 network, while all previously devised compression schemes for wireless sensor data have a more substantial protocol dependence and thus require revisions as protocols are updated, or even complete replacement. Secondly, this method is adaptive,...

BPN559: Interfacing Smart Phones with Low Power Wireless Devices

Nahir Sarmicanic
Thomas Watteyne
2010

Interfacing smart phones with low power wireless radios enables the phone to interact with low power wireless devices such as individual motes of a wireless sensor network. Smart phones are ubiquitous and offer advanced user interface capabilities such as tilt sensor, accelerometer and touch screen. Combining both technologies opens up a whole new class of possibilities for a user to interact with low power wireless devices. The goal of this project is to develop applications for sending and receiving real time data to from wireless motes. This type of applications is not only useful...

BPN524: Wireless Sensor Network Scalability and Deployment in Industrial Automation

Samuel B. Zats
2010

Analyses and simulations of a comprehensive wireless sensor network for industrial automation applications. Utilizing WirelessHART architecture, the proposed network will consist of 1 million motes within an area of 10 km2. Each mote is presumed to be single sensing and sampling vibration, pressure, temperature, or light. The project seeks to evaluate the scaling limits and challenges for deployment of a reliable (characterized by at least 99.9% reliability), frequently sensing (measuring levels every 10 secs), low power (7+ year lifetime power), secure wireless network (encrypted...

BPN592: Workshop: Hands-On Intro to Low-Power Wireless Sensor Networking

Dr. Anita Flynn
Dr. Thomas Watteyne
Leo Keselman
2010

This IAB we have prepared a half-day tech-transfer workshop for industrial members teaching background, fundamentals, advantages and limitations associated with standards-based low-power sensor networks. Open standards are important because they allow technologies to gain traction and industries to blossom. Open-source reference implementations take things one step further. Because standard protocols invariably allow optional configurations, a reference implementation gives people a concrete example of how to get started. The proposed IEEE802.15.4e standard prescribes time...

BPN572: Decentralized TSCH Scheduling for a Floating Wireless Sensor Network

Andrew Tinka
Kevin Weekly
Thomas Watteyne
2011

The Floating Sensor Network system is a fleet of robotic sensor packages with water quality sensors, GPS receivers, and 802.15.4 wireless communication modules. They are deployed in riverine and estuarine environments to observe the water flow and propagation of constituents such as salt, nitrates, and other contaminants. Their observations will be used for real-time estimates and forecasts of the system state. The connectivity is dynamic and unpredictable, making a centralized scheme challenging. Our project will develop networking algorithms and methods to enable reliable...

BPN576: Off-the-Shelf Sensors for Wireless Smart Home Applications

Alex Sun
James Peng
Edmund Ye
Thomas Watteyne
2010

The goal of this project is to show proof of concept that, with widely available and relatively inexpensive off-the-shelf sensors, wireless low-power sensor networks can be easily created and integrated into everyday life. The eventual objective is to equip a house with a wide variety sensors and actuators, allowing a user to wirelessly monitor and control his or her home. Installation should be easy and flexible enough so that the wireless motes of the network can be added on to any pre-existing structure.

Project end date: 02/04/11

BPN470: Low Power All-Digital Transceiver for Wireless Sensor Network

Richard Y. Su
2011

Radios available today are designed to be high performance devices, and they consume about 30mW (CC1101). We would like to demonstrate an all-digital transceiver using only standard cell library components. This new design paradigm will focus mainly on low cost, ease of design, portability, and also decent performance. This transceiver will operate somewhere between 50 MHz and 1000 MHz, and it will have reasonable sensitivity and wide-band linearity across this band with low power consumption. No passive components, except for capacitors, will be used. The goal of this is to develop...

BPN477: OpenWSN: Open-Source Standards-Based Protocol Stacks for Wireless Sensor Networks

Thomas Watteyne
2010

We are building a multi-platform, multi-operating system, fully standards-compliant interoperable wireless sensor network stack. Major standardization bodies have been looking at how wireless multi- hop networks should operate reliably (IEEE 802.15.4E, IETF RPL), how they can integrate within the Internet (IETF 6LoWPAN), and how utilities and end users should interact (OpenADR). All of these standards are being finalized. The OpenWSN project aims at federating these standards into a fully- functional protocol stack, at implementing these on a number of hardware and software platforms...