According to the latest report, nature is always the perfect source of inspiration for new technology innovation, and the project developed by the University of Washington team proves this again.
Surprised by how dandelions spread through their feathers and wind, the team decided to inject this approach into the dispersion of wireless sensors over vast areas such as farms and forests.
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According to the team, monitoring environmental conditions over vast areas of land by manually placing sensors can take several months. However, this will change with the tiny sensor system, which is carefully placed in a lightweight material with a petal-like shape. They will be released into the air by drones, and the wind will be used to spread them.
“We showed that it’s possible to create tiny things using off-the-shelf components. The prototype suggested that thousands of such devices could be released at once using a drone. They would all be carried away by the wind, essentially creating a single drop of 1,000 devices network” said senior author Shyam Gollakota, a professor in the University of Washington’s School of Computer Science and Engineering, “which is amazing and transformative for the field of deploying sensors, which can now take months to manually deploy so many sensors.”
While the capabilities of these devices are promising, they present a challenge: The system itself, which can accommodate at least four sensors, weighs about 30 times as much as a milligram of a dandelion seed. With this, the team had to find the perfect design for the material used as the sensor parachute. They needed a device that would allow the sensors to spend more time floating in the air when the wind blows. This will lead to a wider dispersion of sensors.
“The way dandelion seed structures work is that they have a center point, and these little bristles stick out to slow their fall. We projected it in 2D to create a base design for our structure,” said lead author of the Allen Institute and Wisconsin University Assistant Professor Vikram Iyer said. “As we added weight, the bristles started to bend inward. We added a ring structure to make it stiffer and take up more area to help slow it down.”
Moreover, the team tested a total of 75 designs, and after finding one, they made designs in different sizes. According to the researchers, various sizes will allow the sensor to drop at different rates.
“This is mimicking biology, where variants are actually features, not bugs,” said co-author Thomas Daniel, a professor of biology at the University of Washington. “Plants have no guarantee that where they grow this year will be good next year, so they have some seeds to spread further afield to hedge their bets.”
Despite the differences in size, the design will ensure the system can reach 100 meters in light winds. Once placed, these devices can send data up to 60 meters away.
The shape will also help the devices land upright 95 percent of the time, which is necessary because they use solar panels instead of batteries. This means they will only work during the day and stop working without full sunlight or at night. Still, the researchers built the system with capacitors so each device could store some charge at night.
“Then we have this little circuit that measures how much energy we have stored, and once the sun comes up and more energy comes in, it triggers the rest of the system to turn on because it senses that a certain threshold has been exceeded,” Iyer said.
Since there is no battery drain, the system can last a long time until it is physically destroyed by different elements. There’s still one challenge, though: non-biodegradable electronics that they leave in the environment. This prompted the team to look for more ways to further develop the project to make its components more biodegradable, environmentally friendly, and adaptable.
“This is just the first step, which is why it’s so exciting,” Iyer said. “We can now think about many other directions such as developing larger-scale deployments, creating devices that can change shape when they fall, or even adding some mobility so that once the device is on the ground it can move to get closer to our area of interest.”
