William Kaiser came to UCLA in 1994 with the idea of starting a sensor program. He quickly gave a faculty seminar to describe some of the technology he'd already developed. In the audience was Greg Pottie, an associate professor in electrical engineering who had been working with other UCLA faculty on the technology necessary to put a miniaturized radio on a computer chip, a device that would make a wireless network of sensors possible.

"Bill Kaiser presented some really interesting small sensors," recalls Pottie. "And I thought, 'Wouldn't it be neat if we could communicate with them. If we can have a radio on a chip and a sensor on a chip and put them together, that might be a really interesting system.'"

Greg Pottie and William Kaiser are working together on a global digital nervous system

Pottie and Kaiser promptly joined forces on a project known as WINS, or Wireless Integrated Network Sensors. Kaiser calls it a global digital nervous system. "The devices will enable fundamental changes in applications spanning the home, office, clinic, factory, vehicle, metropolitan area and the global environment," he explains. Business Week, which included WINS as one of its "21 ideas for the 21st Century," believes the technology will lead to the equivalent of an electronic skin for the Earth, with the Internet serving as the nervous system that receives and transmits the sensations. Wrote the magazine: "This skin is already being stitched together. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. These will probe and monitor cities and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies, even our dreams."

The magazine predicts that within a decade "there will be trillions of such telemetric systems, each with a microprocessor and a body," all in contact with the Internet. In fact, the House Science Committee recently named Kaiser and Pottie's idea one of the "Great Advances in Scientific Discovery During the 105th Congress." The concept requires a range of new technologies: not just sensor systems, but low-power integrated electronics, wireless communications, signal processing, computing and networking and software engineering, all of which are being pursued by Kaiser, Pottie and their UCLA colleagues.

Such big dreams for Kaiser started back in his graduate-school days, when he worked on sensor technology at Wayne State University in Detroit. He collaborated with the Ford Motor Company, developing automotive emission-control sensors. From there, he went on to Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on miniaturized weather and seismic sensors that could be distributed on a planetary surface.

"One of the things I realized was the great cost associated with deploying sensors and gaining network access to them," says Kaiser. "Distributed sensors need to be deployed, operated quickly without a lot of intervention. They must be autonomous, and they can't suffer from all the maintenance requirements of conventional computers. Yet they must still be smart, process data, detect an event and notify us as to the event."

Together, he and Pottie, whose expertise was in reliable communications systems, figured out a way to make it work. The two decided to create sensors that would link the physical world to the Internet.

"Virtually all the data on the Internet right now is data people enter into it - newspaper information, stock market quotes, etc.," explains Kaiser. "Our interest was in providing Internet access to the physical environment by distributed wireless sensors, all Internet accessible. And making each sensor intelligent. It would contain signal processing, computing and wireless networking and ultimately might be as small as a postage stamp."

The program started in 1994 with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency to create low-power wireless integrated microsensors. Their first sensor would measure seismic signals - "basically a mass on a spring," as Pottie puts it - that could be distributed on a battlefield and would detect the footsteps of nearby troops or the rumble of vehicles. With Oscar Stafsudd, a professor of electrical engineering, they also developed a low-powered infrared sensor that could also be used to detect motion by noting changes in temperature.

The next step for Pottie and Kaiser was to create a self-organizing network of sensors that could also cooperate to do their network decision-making. Imagine a system of sensors distributed over a potential battlefield, explains Pottie. Each sensor can be thought of as the node of a network-to-be. "Each node sends out an invitation at some random interval and the nodes nearby respond," he explains. "Then they set up a fixed time at which they communicate. Then other nodes can join in one at a time and can form a network. They can also form little sub-networks. By the time it's done, everyone is connected."

At present, the WINS program is still dedicated to long-range and fundamental research to enable the sensor technology. But Kaiser and Pottie are also moving on to new challenges, like creating sensors that actually move - small robots, in effect - that physically self-assemble. "After deployment, they find each other, operate cooperatively and are mobile," notes Kaiser. And what does it take to accomplish this? "That's what we are going to find out," he adds.

Kaiser and Pottie are also working on integrating all the necessary technology into a single device: a thin film battery to power everything - the sensor itself and communications. Once they've got the sensor technology down, they can start putting actuators in their devices. The result will be devices that not only monitor the environment, but can respond without having to be told to do so.

The commercial market, as Pottie points out, "is potentially huge." "Consider how ubiquitous computers have become," he says, "and computers need a lot of babying to form a network. Now imagine these devices automatically connecting themselves to networks, and you can imagine thousands of these devices for every person. The result would be a whole new way of doing things - a new way of life."

Like something straight out of, well . . . Star Trek..

| Next: A Nose for Nitro |