A Mobile Sensor Network Using Autonomously Controlled Animals

1. A Mobile Sensor Network Using Autonomously Controlled Animals Yihan Li, Shivendra S. Panwar and Srinivas Burugupalli New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT) ECE Dept., Polytechnic University

2. Autonomously Controlled Animals • Achievements by Dr. John Chapin and his group at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. • Stimulate multiple brain regions of rats to produce stimulus cues for various commanded movements and rewards to reinforce their movements. • Use wireless communication to deliver brain stimulation.

3. A Mobile Bio-sensor

4. A Mobile Bio-sensor Network • Remotely guided animals are ideal for search and rescue operations. • Naturally adept at negotiating difficult 3D terrain and traversing particular obstacles. • Can be trained to detect and home in on specific sensory targets. • Applications • Natural disaster recovery • Homeland security • Military operations

5. System Overview • The remote control center • Receives and processes sensor data. • Sends guidance command to animals. • Animals, carrying backpacks • Microprocessor, wireless transceiver, Camera, battery • Limited weight (100 grams for a rat). • Locally executed computation must be extremely simple. • Ad hoc network infrastructure.

6. Task Allocation among Sensors • Seeker • Trained to use olfactory and other senses to find a particular target. • Carries a camera and a low power wireless communication system. • Transmits sensor data at low power to nearby followers. • Follower • Trained to closely follow a seeker everywhere. • Processes sensor data (from a seeker) and transmits it at higher power. • Relays • Form a chain of repeaters between seeker/follower and the control center.

7. Network Architecture Seeker/follower pair Relay Command Center Visualization of the search field Explored Region Unexplored Space

8. Technical Issues • Animal training and behavior modeling • Sensor data processing and transmission • Cooperative control of animal sensors • Wireless communications • Backpack development

9. Wireless Communication • Challenges • Harsh radio propagation environment • Tight constraints on equipment size and weight • Critical importance of battery energy conservation • Interrelated research areas • Network topology design • Radio propagation modeling • Radio resources management • Media access control techniques • Routing algorithms

10. Two Kinds of Messages • Sensor data • Long • Sent only from seekers to the control center • Control messages • Short • Sent frequently • between the control center and animals • among group of animals

11. Routing in the Bio-sensor Network • Needs to be simple, efficient and reliable. • Proposed routing scheme • Flooding for control messages. • Location-aware routing for data messages. • Under investigation. More work will be done on design, performance simulation and analysis.

12. Transport Protocol in the Bio-sensor network • Will investigate • One-dimensional topology • Multipath transmission • Delayed sensor data is still desirable for later review and backtracking. • Will be cached for retransmission. • Different from usual wireless network.

13. Backpack Prototype Development • An early version of the backpack prototype

14. Devices Used in the Backpack • Cerfcubes from Intrinsyc Software • Axis 205 network camera from Axis Communications • NetGate EL-2511 MP Plus 802.11b miniPCI card • Antennas

15. Control center camera cube1 cube2 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 x.x.1.1 x.x.3.2 A Simple Network Using Fixed Routing A screen shot of the video received by the control center

16. Future Work on Backpack Prototype • Reduce the weight. • Implement dynamic routing. • Implement sensor data processing and control schemes.

17. Thanks!