Collaborative Research: CCRI: NEW: Building a Batteryless Computing Community through Access to Education, Testbeds, and Tools

Batteries are a pressing challenge for the rapidly growing Internet of Things. They wear out, require regular maintenance, and increase the cost of small computing devices. Fueled by recent advances, a fledgling community of researchers has begun developing batteryless computing devices that cost less, do not need to be charged, are powered by harvested energy, and are more sustainable than their traditional counterparts. In this community, research opportunities are both abundant and challenging, and new researchers from diverse backgrounds are needed if the community is to grow. Unfortunately, new researchers face a steep learning curve, technical design challenges, and gaps in educational materials. Worse, most of the community’s core hardware and software tools and computing platforms are poorly documented, difficult to use, and not commercially available. This project’s goal is to help the batteryless computing community grow by removing these barriers. The project aims to accomplish this by creating an online community research hub that brings together essential digital artifacts and information from community members and a collection of community hardware devices --development, testing, and experimentation tools and platforms-- that will be manufactured and made available to the community in the form of starter kits for new researchers interested in joining the community. Ultimately, low-cost sensors and other computing devices that can operate for decades without batteries and regular maintenance will reduce the environmental cost of the Internet of Things and have a profound impact on the national economy by opening up new opportunities in healthcare, agriculture, transportation, space exploration, and other scientific fields that require long-term data gathering. This project’s community hub and inventory will expand public access to new hardware and software designs, artifacts, and educational materials. Furthermore, the project directly involves undergraduate and graduate students, expanding the supply of scientists educated in this important, emerging research area. This project will help past and future research results transition into public use, accelerate research progress, and encourage new researchers from many traditionally-separate computing fields to apply their expertise to critical scientific questions and challenges, like improving the security of unreliably-powered computing devices, enabling effective wireless communication in spite of intermittent failures, and bringing modern machine learning techniques to unpredictable low-power computing environments. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.