Arch Rock Putting Feelers Out to the Physical World
Not Big Brother, but SOA sensors are afoot
By Edward J. Correia
May 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 3)
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.”
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