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AS OF 7/20/2008 5:38PM EST
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Arch Rock Putting Feelers Out to the Physical World
Not Big Brother, but SOA sensors are afoot
By Edward J. Correia
May 1, 2006 —
If the thought of a global array of Internet-based sensors monitoring every aspect of the physical world conjures up images of George Orwell’s “1984,” relax. It’s really not that bad.
At least, not according to the founders of Arch Rock, who in late March unveiled their vision of a world in which wireless sensors could be used by farmers to monitor rainfall and fertilizer consumption, by logistics companies to track shipments, by municipalities to monitor parking meters and bridge and road conditions, or by utilities to observe energy consumption.
“With the Internet, we’ve been able to connect every person to every other person,” said David Culler, co-founder and CTO of Arch Rock, a private company based in San Francisco. “The opportunity now is to connect everything of value—to expand the Internet to embrace the physical world.”
Culler, a UC Berkeley professor, is a former director of Intel Research Berkeley and principal investigator of DARPA’s Network Embedded Systems Technology (DARPA NEST), which created the TinyOS open-source platform for wireless sensor networks. Arch Rock, which incorporated in May of 2005, last March received US$5 million in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associates, Shasta Ventures and Intel Capital.
TinyOS and its accompanying TinyDB will form the basis for the company’s platform that will operate and control a series of low-power sensors of varying makers, sizes and functions. They will be Internet-connected via a wireless peer-to-peer grid, and will be Web services- and SOA-savvy. TinyOS already runs on dozens of platforms, Culler said, including those based on microcontrollers and processors from ARM, Intel and Texas Instruments. Specifics will be announced later this year.
Arch Rock president and CEO Roland Acra, said the idea is to offer tools that can be used by people without specialized skills. “Formerly, people had to be engineers to set up this type of sensor network,” he said. “We will be providing users with the ability to create meaningful, content-specific data that originates as sensor bytes.”
The platform, Culler continued, will “embrace and extend WiFi and GPRS and have lots of ways of getting from the physical to the informational world.” That’s not to say that devices won’t come and go. He said the software will be able to adapt to changes as batteries die, and as nodes fail or are destroyed. “Sensors won’t have people baby-sitting them, so they have to have flexible networking capabilities. That’s where Web services come in, to bring information into the channels and to act on it and integrate it within the broad setting of information on the Internet.”
Unlike Orwell’s vision of the Big Brother government, which scrutinized the movements of every citizen, sensor networks will be more akin to a captive stepchild. “This technology isn’t focused on observing people and their actions but on the world in which we function,” said Culler. “It’s focused on growing the food we eat, getting it where it needs to be safely and for utilizing the technology for different kinds of awareness and understanding so we can take wiser actions.”
“The prevailing set of radio protocols,” added Acra, “are of low power for longevity and duration,” he said, and consequently are safe from prying eyes because of their somewhat limited range. “It’s a local phenomenon. You make it global by coupling it with the Internet, but you can control that.”
Asked where sensor networks would be in five years, Culler said, “Sooner or later, sensors will become a large majority of the devices on the Internet.
Sun Is Spot-On
Culler is gratified by efforts like Sun Microsystems’ Small Programmable Object Technology (SPOT) sensor project, which in May is set to release a hardware and software kit that includes a CLDC JVM that runs directly on the sensor processor. “It’s an important part of the market maturing. The sense of integrating physical information into the Internet and programming environments is good validation for what we see as the future.”
The programming models of the two platforms are similar. “You can build system capabilities in Java as objects, and that was at the heart of the design of TinyOS—you can compose systems from building blocks that are robust,” Culler said. Languages available for data manipulation are those of high-level enterprise systems, including Perl, Python, Java and .NET. As development gets closer to the nodes, languages are constrained by the hardware. “We operate in ANSI C extended to provide ease of constructing protocols.”
Culler explained the symbolism behind the company’s chosen name and logo. “An arch rock is a bridge in the natural world. And we’re bridging the physical world to the information world.”
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