2018

The IoT requires rethinking of traditional ways of providing power. The environment is a source of mechanical energy that could be converted into electrical energy via the direct piezoelectric effect. In order to have a reliable and sustainable energy supply for low power sensing systems in buildings, vibrational energy harvesting is being pursued. Lead based materials in a piezoelectric compliant mechanism energy harvester can provide up to 3.9 mWcm^-2g² (H.G. Yeo, 2016).

The goal of this research is to enable a broad spectrum of programmers to successfully create apps for distributed computing systems including smart and connected communities, or for systems that require tight coordination or synchronization of time. Creating an application for, say, a smart intersection necessitates gathering information from multiple sources, e.g., cameras, traffic sensors, and passing vehicles; performing distributed computation; and then triggering some action, such as a warning.

Inexpensive computation and ubiquitous embedded sensing, actuation, and communication provide tremendous opportunities for societal impact, but also great challenges in the design of networked control systems, because the traditional unity feedback loop that operates in continuous time or at a fixed sampling rate is not adequate when sensor data arrives from multiple sources, asynchronously, delayed, possibly corrupted, and -- especially important for this project -- the different entities that participate in the control system do not share a common clock.

Wearable electronics are widely used in health monitoring and wearable computing. The needs for comfort, biocompatibility, and operability call for special attention to new generation technologies.

This project is a collaborative grant involving the University of Michigan (Award number CNS-1646392) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Award number CNS-1646305).