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

对于快速发展的物联网来说，电池是一个紧迫的挑战。它们会磨损，需要定期维护，并且增加了小型计算设备的成本。在最新进展的推动下，一群刚刚起步的研究人员开始开发无电池计算设备，这种设备成本更低，不需要充电，由收集的能量供电，比传统设备更具可持续性。在这个社区中，研究机会既丰富又具有挑战性，如果社区要发展，就需要来自不同背景的新研究人员。不幸的是，新的研究人员面临着陡峭的学习曲线、技术设计挑战和教育材料的差距。更糟糕的是，大多数社区的核心硬件和软件工具以及计算平台都没有良好的文档记录，难以使用，而且没有商业可用性。这个项目的目标是通过消除这些障碍来帮助无电池计算社区的发展。该项目旨在通过创建一个在线社区研究中心来实现这一目标，该中心汇集了来自社区成员的基本数字工件和信息，以及一系列社区硬件设备——开发、测试和实验工具和平台——这些设备将被制造出来，并以入门工具包的形式提供给社区，供有兴趣加入社区的新研究人员使用。最终，无需电池和定期维护即可运行数十年的低成本传感器和其他计算设备将降低物联网的环境成本，并通过在医疗保健、农业、交通运输、太空探索和其他需要长期数据收集的科学领域开辟新的机会，对国民经济产生深远影响。这个项目的社区中心和目录将扩大公众对新硬件和软件设计、工件和教育材料的访问。此外，该项目直接涉及本科生和研究生，扩大了在这一重要的新兴研究领域受过教育的科学家的供应。该项目将帮助过去和未来的研究成果转化为公共使用，加速研究进展，并鼓励来自许多传统上独立的计算领域的新研究人员将他们的专业知识应用于关键的科学问题和挑战，如提高供电不可靠的计算设备的安全性，在间歇性故障的情况下实现有效的无线通信，并将现代机器学习技术引入不可预测的低功耗计算环境。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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 thecommunity 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.