The direction of all electronics and technology continues to be toward ever smaller and more portable products.

The first generation of computers, giants that filled entire rooms with whirring gears and fans, gave way to desktop versions run by transistors. The technology shrank dramatically with the invention of silicon chips. Laptops have been miniaturized to handheld computers, and cell phones are half the size they were just five years ago. That trend is reflected in AI also. A cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology being perfected at the University of California at Berkeley works on an incredibly small scale. "Smart dust" is a network of wireless microelectromechanical sensors the size of dust particlesimagine grains of sand with a brainthat could monitor everything from temperature, light, vibration, and movement to radiation and toxic chemicals. The particles of smart dust, called motes, could be as small as one cubic millimeter, which would fit on the tip of a ballpoint pen. At present, prototype smart dust motes are about the size of a pager and run on AA batteries. But these sensors have Read more: http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Artificial-Intelligence/The-Future-ofAI.html#ixzz1Vf6l7SH3 infinite possibilities. Scientists hope that these mini-sensors can be sprinkled throughout a large area like tiny dust motes floating in the air. Networked by the hundreds, smart dust motes can pass information from one to the other almost instantaneously. They survey the world around them and "chat" wirelessly through the system until the information reaches a central computer. Smart dust is being marketed for use in factories, homes, and public places and for commercial, military, medical, security, and ecological applications. For example, sensors dispersed in an art gallery could sense movement when the gallery was closed. They could be placed anywhere inside or outside an active airport to detect chemical weapons or plastic explosives. Sensors dropped from an airplane could help predict the path of a forest fire, Read more: http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Artificial-Intelligence/The-Future-ofAI.html#ixzz1Vf6qTABQ

Smart Dust: The idea of smart dust was introduced by Kristofer S. J. Pister at the University of California in 2001. Smartdust has been conceptualized as an RF powered network of tiny wireless micro-electromechanical systems including sensors, robots, or other devices, installed with wireless communications, that can detect anything from light, to temperature, to vibrations, to chemical composition, etc. With the same equipment used to sow seeds, smart dust will be planted into the soil to begin the monitoring process. Farms that are imbedded with smart dust will essentially be glowing with real-time information.

Beyond the notion of simply monitoring a piece of land, smart dust will become the interface to the soil. Scientists are now studying the use of magnetism at the nanoscale to monitor and control biological activity, at the cellular and even the single-molecule level. By emitting everything from magnetic fields, to sound waves, to signal frequencies, farmers will begin to experiment with micro-controls to alter plant characteristics, ward off pests, and enhance crop production. Higher protein levels needed? Just dial it in. Problem with borers or weevils? Just adjust the frequency to chase them off. First generation smart dust will be quite expensive and each particle will be carefully tracked. But a few innovation cycles later, the price will plummet, and over time their use will become ubiquitous.
Smart Dust motes is a new revolutionary technology consisting of tiny, wireless sensors that when clustered together, these motes automatically create highly flexible, low power networks These devices are able to perform a wide range of functions such as ; motion detection, light detection, temperature and humidity reading. These sensors are available in different sizes; some are as big as a deck of cards or as small as a stack of few quarters. Dust mote battery life ranges from a couple of hours to about 10 years. This depends on the size and capability of the device.

A single Smart Dust mote has: A semiconductor laser diode and MEMS beam steering mirror for active optical transmission A MEMS corner cube retro-reflector for passive optical transmission An Optical receiver A single processing and control circuitry A power source based on thick-film batteries and solar cells.

SmartDust is a revolutionary technology; it was conceived in 1998 By Dr. Kris Pister. Even though wireless already existed, nothing like the SmartDust had been ever seen before. The name SmartDust comes from how this tiny particle is capable of doing so many things. SmartDust has become very useful today and many organizations and industries are incorporating it. SmartDust today works as a device to detect motion, it is very common in the military where it is used to

track enemy movement. Before SmartDust existed in the military had to take turns guarding and watching out for enemies close by. SmartDust technology has been replacing tasks that had to be done by humans. For example with SmartDust technology you can now walk out from a room and the SmartDust will automatically detect that there is no one in the room and will turn the lights off. Through the years and improvements in technology SmartDust will be able to do the unimaginable.

The picture above is an example of a SmartDust that can detect a intrusion within a parameter of 50 meters. It is one of the cheapest and smartest on the market at around 25 cents.

Disadv: Just like there are advantages for organizations using SmartDust, there are also some disadvantages. For example SmartDus technology runs in very high power consumption, and the battery can last as few as a couple of hours. SmartDust is commonly used in the military to track enemy movement 24/7. Therefore SmartDust with low battery duration will not be very useful for surveillance.

How small do you think a sensor can be?

Well most probably a 5 cent coint size. Hmm maybe the size of a rice grains. The right answer is 0.05 X 0.05mm size. It is more like a dust.

What is the innovation known as smart dust?

Smart dust is a global network of microprobes with sensors (micro-electromechanical systems, known as MEMS) and nano-robots that see and watch all that occurs under the roof of ones home (whether you want them to or not). They can look after the sick and treat them with smart drugs, which are decided upon by considering the patients individual genetic profile. The smart dust technology also known as smart matter, combines computers with tiny mechanical devices such as sensors, valves, gears, mirrors, and actuators embedded in semiconductor chips. According to Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, MEMS or what he calls analog computing will be the foundational technology of the next decade.

How are MEMS in use or currently under study by Russian scientists?

MEMS are currently employed as accelerometers in automobile air-bags, having supplanted a more costly and less reliable device. They show promise of being able to expand the effectiveness of air bags by being able to inflate one not only on the basis of sensed deceleration but also on the basis of the size of the person they are protecting. Other available uses of MEMS or those under study include: global positioning system sensors that provide the constant tracking and treatment of parcels airplane sensors built into the fabric of the wing that can sense and react to air flow by altering the resistance of the wing surface via many tiny wing flaps optical switching devices that use different paths to switch light signals energy-saving, sensor-driven heating and cooling systems sensors embedded into building supports that affect stress sensing MEMS may well be a major technology for the future, although with the help of Russian and other European and American scientists, it may be closer on the horizon than previously thought. Children of the future may well be born with a permanent pocket on their hip to carry their microchips with them wherever they may go!
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), such organization once paid attention on the concept and product called smart dust. It is military

technology of surveillance. It has sensors and wire-less network function,very small surely like dust as its name, it designed to survive in low battery consumption, rather generate electric power by sunlight or vibration of its surrounds. The mesh network function is pre-programmed. The collection organize network by themselves, send and relay the captured environment data. It is really smart and like dust. Then it watches big area without man. Corpora at the moment is using Zigbee Sensor Network to collect data.

This project seeks to understand the challenges and design requirements for tracking and control using a wireless sensor network (WSN). We implemented an indoor 5 by 5 network of the Berkeley Mica motes for tracking a small RC car. The car is tracked with the mote's magnetic sensor, and the estimated location of the vehicle is relayed to a base-station that controls a pan-tilt-zoom camera to follow the vehicle. In particular, as individual motes sense the vehicle, they broadcast their reading to share this information with neighboring motes. Periodically, the mote with the largest, recent magnetic sensing, elects itself as a leader, aggregates recent readings from a small neighborhood, and multi-hops this message back to the root node. The multi-hop broadcast works using a fixed routing table: messages are routed down and to the left. The base-station, using a snooping mote, receives aggregated magnetic readings and controls the camera to point at the center of mass of these readings. The implementation was successful for tracking the RC car with relatively low noise. Occasional spurious and missing magnetic detections caused the camera to lose the car or pan to the wrong region of the network

You may have heard about a computing concept known as motes. This concept is also called smart dust and wireless sensing networks. At one point, just about every issue of Popular Science, Discover and Wired today contains a blurb about some new application of the mote idea. For example, the military plans to use them to gather information on battlefields, and engineers plan to mix them into concrete and use them to internally monitor the health of buildings and bridges. There are thousands of different ways that motes might be used, and as people get familiar with the concept they come up with even more. It is a completely new paradigm for distributed sensing and it is opening up a fascinating new way to look at computers. In this article, you will have a chance to understand how motes work and see many of the possible applications of the technology. Then we will look at a MICA mote -- an existing technology that you can buy to experiment with this unique way of sensing the world.

How mote works???

The "mote" concept creates a new way of thinking about computers, but the basic idea is pretty simple:

The core of a mote is a small, low-cost, low-power computer.

The computer monitors one or more sensors. It is easy to imagine all sorts of sensors, including sensors for temperature, light, sound, position, acceleration, vibration, stress, weight, pressure, humidity, etc. Not all mote applications require sensors, but sensing applications are very common. The computer connects to the outside world with a radio link. The most common radio links allow a mote to transmit at a distance of something like 10 to 200 feet (3 to 61 meters). Power consumption, size and cost are the barriers to longer distances. Since a fundamental concept with motes is tiny size (and associated tiny cost), small and lowpower radios are normal.

Motes can either run off of batteries, or they can tap into the power grid in certain applications. As motes shrink in size and Photo courtesy Crossbow Technology, Inc. power consumption, it is possible to imagine solar power or The MICA2DOT mote, typically even something exotic like vibration power to keep them powered by a circular button battery, is not much bigger running.
than a quarter.

All of these parts are packaged together in the smallest container possible. In the future, people imagine shrinking motes to fit into something just a few millimeters on a side. It is more common for motes today, including batteries and antenna, to be the size of a stack of five or six quarters, or the size of a pack of cigarettes. The battery is usually the biggest part of the package right now. Current motes, in bulk, might cost something on the order of $25, but prices are falling. It is hard to imagine something as small and innocuous as a mote sparking a revolution, but that's exactly what they have done. We'll look at a number of possible applications in the next section. If you survey the literature for different ways that people have thought of to use motes, you find a huge assortment of ideas. Here's a collection culled from the links at the end of the article. It is possible to think of motes as lone sensors. For example:

You could embed motes in bridges when you pour the concrete. The mote could have a sensor on it that can detect the salt concentration within the concrete. Then once a month you could drive a truck over the bridge that sends a powerful magnetic field into the bridge. The magnetic field would allow the motes, which are burried within the concrete of the bridge, to power on and transmit the salt concentration. Salt (perhaps from deicing or ocean spray) weakens concrete and corrodes the steel rebar that strengthens the concrete. Salt sensors would let bridge maintenance personnel gauge how much damage salt is doing. Other possible sensors embedded into the concrete of a bridge might detect vibration, stress, temperature swings, cracking, etc., all of which would help maintenance personnel spot problems long before they become critical. You could connect sensors to a mote that can monitor the condition of machinery -temperature, number of revolutions, oil level, etc. and log it in the mote's memory. Then, when a truck drives by, the mote could transmit all the logged data. This would allow detailed maintenance records to be kept on machinery (for example, in an oil field), without maintenance personnel having to go measure all of those parameters themselves.

You could attach motes to the water meters or power meters in a neighborhood. The motes would log power and water consumption for a customer. When a truck drives by, the motes get a signal from the truck and they send their data. This would allow a person to read all the meters in a neighborhood very easily, simply by driving down the street.

All of these ideas are good; some allow sensors to move into places where they have not been before (such as embedded in concrete) and others reduce the time needed to read sensors individually. However, much of the greatest excitement about motes comes from the idea of using large numbers of motes that communicate with each other and form ad hoc networks.

A Typical Mote
MICA mote is a commercially available product that has been used widely by researchers and developers. It has all of the typical features of a mote and therefore can help you understand what this technology makes possible today. MICA motes are available to the general public through a company called Crossbow. These motes come in two form factors:

Photo courtesy JLH Labs

"Spec" sitting on top of the previous generation of UC Berkeley Motes, the Mica node. The size reduction is amazing.

Rectangular, measuring 2.25 x 1.25 by 0.25 inches (5.7 x 3.18 x.64 centimeters), it is sized to fit on top of two AA batteries that provide it with power. Circular, measuring 1.0 by 0.25 inches (2.5 x .64 centimeters), it is sized to fit on top of a 3 volt button cell battery.

The MICA mote uses an Atmel ATmega 128L processor running at 4 megahertz. The 128L is an 8-bit microcontroller that has 128 kilobytes of onboard flash memory to store the mote's program. This CPU is about as powerful as the 8088 CPU found in the original IBM PC (circa 1982). The big difference is that the ATmega consumes only 8 milliamps when it is running, and only 15 microamps in sleep mode.

This low power consumption allows a MICA mote to run for more than a year with two AA batteries. A typical AA battery can produce about 1,000 milliamp-hours. At 8 milliamps, the ATmega would operate for about 120 hours if it operated constantly. However, the programmer will typically write his/her code so that the CPU is asleep much of the time, allowing it to extend battery life considerably. For example, the mote might sleep for 10 seconds, wake up and check status for a few microseconds, and then go back to sleep.

Photo courtesy JLH Labs

Broad view of "Spec" sitting on top of the previous generation of UC Berkeley Motes, the Mica node. "Spec" is the tiny little square on top of the raised bit in the middle.

MICA motes come with 512 kilobytes of flash memory to hold data. They also have a 10-bit A/D converter so that sensor data can be digitized. Separate sensors on a daughter card can connect to the mote. Sensors available include temperature, acceleration, light, sound and magnetic. Advanced sensors for things like GPS signals are under development. The final component of a MICA mote is the radio. It has a range of several hundred feet and can transmit approximately 40,000 bits per second. When it is off, the radio consumes less than one microamp. When receiving data, it consumes 10 milliamps. When transmitting, it consumes 25 milliamps. Conserving radio power is key to long battery life. All of these hardware components together create a MICA mote. A programmer writes software to control the mote and make it perform a certain way. Software on MICA motes is built on an operating system called TinyOS. TinyOS is helpful because it deals with the radio and power management systems for you and makes it much easier to write software for the mote.