Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)

Our long term goal is to prototype and evaluate a reliable, self-healing wireless mesh sensor network for use in mines, caves, and underground storage facilities. Its primary application will be to monitor the physical environment, such as temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, as well as detection of potentially hazardous gases such as carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4). We will evaluate the feasibility of using real-time wireless sensor networks to monitor operating environments and to provide hazard identification and warning. An important aspect...

The goal of this project is to make dust-sized, wearable, autonomous wireless sensor nodes practically realizable by substantially reducing the power demands of the system's most power hungry section; the RF circuits. To that end, a novel RF transceiver capable of delivering adequate performance for sensor networks while consuming remarkably little power has been developed. Substantial power reduction in the RF circuits will shrink the size of battery required to sustain an autonomous sensor node. The goals for power consumption are dependent on the particular requirements placed on...

Our goal is to create a class of autonomous microrobots with a volume of less than 1cm3. We previously reported an autonomous micromachined silicon legged robot which took its first steps. The body of the robot was fabricated in a planarized silicon-on-insulator (SOI), two-layer polysilicon process and was 8 mm x 4 mm x 0.3 mm in size. The complete robot had two additional ICs, a solar cell and high voltage buffer chip along with a low-voltage CMOS chip for sequencing. However, due to the processing complexity and fragility of these robots, we are investigating new processing and...

The goal of this project is to create useful, efficient design synthesis tools for MEMS devices. Design synthesis helps engineers develop rapid, optimal configurations for a given set of performance and constraint guidelines. The current MEMS design synthesis tool is based on a case-based design library and uses variant optimization techniques for adapting old designs to new design problems. The design synthesis tool recommends the initial designs to the designer based on the given design specifications and further optimizes the design parameters to satisfy the design performance...