CAREER: Enabling Low-Cost, Maintenance-Free, Long-Term Embedded Sensing Without Batteries

无限、稳定和可靠的能力是大多数传统计算系统和抽象设计的基础。该项目探索了新的技术和工具，用于开发不依赖电池并由各种环境能源供电的复杂传感应用程序。对于系统设计人员来说，用电容器取代电池有很多好处。电容器体积更小，成本更低，部署时间比电池长达数十年--电池在两到五年后就会耗尽。但是，即使有了能量收集的进步，当前基于电容器的设备也很难编程、测试和部署，因为能源供应波动、能量存储有限和频繁断电。该项目将探索和制作硬件技术、软件系统、编程语言和工具的原型，使应用程序设计人员能够快速制作复杂应用程序的原型，专注于应用程序目标，而不是避免电源故障并从中恢复。该项目的重点是研究议程：1)设计和开发专门用于瞬变供电传感设备的新型计算平台；2)用于管理硬件中收集的能量以简化软件设计的原型技术；3)开发新的编程模型，允许程序员以简单的容忍中断的形式表示应用程序；4)开发运行时技术，以调度计算任务，以便在不可预测的停电的情况下有效地实现应用程序目标；5)创建新的工具，帮助开发人员预测他们的瞬变供电应用程序在部署时的表现；以及6)在实际试点部署的背景下评估这些贡献。该项目包括广泛的K-12扩展，将提供进行创新研究的经验，并与生物学家和其他领域科学家合作，为研究生和本科生开发设备，在提供数据的同时提供数十年的有用数据。

Unlimited, stable, and reliable power is an assumption upon which most traditional computing systems and abstractions are designed. This project explores new techniques and tools for developing sophisticated sensing applications that do not rely on batteries and are powered by a variety of environmental energy sources. Replacing batteries with capacitors has many advantages for system designers. Capacitors have smaller size, lower cost, and the potential for deployments lasting decades longer than batteries - which wear out after two to five years. But even with energy harvesting advances, current capacitor-based devices are difficult to program, test, and deploy due to fluctuating energy supplies, limited energy storage, and frequent loss of power. This project will explore and prototype hardware techniques, software systems, programming languages, and tools that will enable application designers to quickly prototype sophisticated applications, focusing on application goals instead of avoiding and recovering from power failures. This project focuses on a research agenda to: 1) design and develop a novel computing platform specifically for transiently-powered sensing devices; 2) prototype techniques for managing harvested energy in hardware in order to simplify software design; 3) develop a new programming model that allows programmers to represent applications in a simple disruption-tolerant form; 4) develop runtime techniques that schedule computing tasks in order to work effectively towards achieving application goals in spite of unpredictable power outages; 5) create novel tools that help developers predict how their transiently-powered applications will perform when deployed; and 6) evaluate these contributions in the context of real pilot deployments. The project, which includes broad k-12 outreach, will provide experiences conducting innovative research and working with biologists and other domain scientists for graduate and undergraduate students around the development of devices that provide useful data for decades in spite of frequent power failures while providing.