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

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 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.

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 3 A Mobile Bio-sensor

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 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

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 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.

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 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.

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 7 Network Architecture Unexplored Space Visualization of the search field Explored Region Command Center Relay Seeker/follower pair

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 8 Technical Issues Animal training and behavior modeling Sensor data processing and transmission Cooperative control of animal sensors Wireless communications Backpack development

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 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

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 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

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 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.

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 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.

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 13 Backpack Prototype Development An early version of the backpack prototype

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 14 Devices Used in the Backpack Cerfcubes from Intrinsyc Software Axis 205 network camera from Axis Communications NetGate EL-2511 MP Plus b miniPCI card Antennas

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 15 A Simple Network Using Fixed Routing cameracube1cube2 Control center x.x x.x.3.2 A screen shot of the video received by the control center

Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications 16 Future Work on Backpack Prototype Reduce the weight. Implement dynamic routing. Implement sensor data processing and control schemes.

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