Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)

Networks of hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes equipped with sensing, computing and communicationability are conceivable with recent technological advancement. Methods are presented in this report to recover and visualize data from wireless sensor networks, as well as to estimate node positions. Acommunication system is assumed wherein information from sensor nodes can be transferred to acentralized computer for data processing, though suggestions are made for extensions to distributed computation. Specifically, this...

The rapid proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both commercial and consumer applications in recent years raises serious concerns of public security, as the versatility of UAVs allow the platform to be easily adapted for malicious activities by adversarial actors. While interdiction methods exist, they are either indiscriminate or are unable to disable a large swarm of drones. Recent work in wireless communications, microelectromechanical systems, fabrication, and multi-agent reinforcement learning make UAV-based counter-UAV systems increasingly feasible - that is, defense...

Solar-powered actuation of a 15 mN electrostatic MEMS gripper was demonstrated while wirelessly triggered by IEEE 802.15.4 RF signals. The solar-powered gripper was shown to actuate at a rate of 640 um/s. The complete system is composed of three capacitors and three chips: MEMS gripper, microprocessor/crystal-free radio, and solar cell array/high voltage buffer. Control signals for the electrostatic inchworm motors originate from the 3x2x0.3 mm3 chip with an ARM Cortex-M0 microprocessor and are passed through 119V high voltage buffers. Power for all components, including the crystal-free...