The vision of embedding connectivity into billions of everyday objects runs into the reality of existing communication technologies -- there is no existing wireless technology that can provide reliable and long-range communication at tens of microwatts of power as well as cost less than a dime. While backscatter is low-power and low-cost, it is known to be limited to short ranges. This paper overturns this conventional wisdom about backscatter and presents the first wide-area backscatter system. Our design can successfully backscatter from any location between an RF source and receiver, separated by 475 m, while being compatible with commodity LoRa hardware. Further, when our backscatter device is co-located with the RF source, the receiver can be as far as 2.8 km away. We deploy our system in a 4,800 ft2 (446 m2) house spread across three floors, a 13,024 ft2 (1210 m2) office area covering 41 rooms, as well as a one-acre (4046 m2) vegetable farm and show that we can achieve reliable coverage, using only a single RF source and receiver. We also build a contact lens prototype as well as a flexible epidermal patch device attached to the human skin. We show that these devices can reliably backscatter data across a 3,328 ft2 (309 m2) room. Finally, we present a design sketch of a LoRa backscatter IC that shows that it costs less than a dime at scale and consumes only 9.25 μW of power, which is more than 1000x lower power than LoRa radio chipsets.

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Vision serves as an essential sensory input for insects but consumes substantial energy resources. The cost to support sensitive photoreceptors has led many insects to develop high visual acuity in only small retinal regions and evolve to move their visual systems independent of their bodies through head motion. By understanding the trade-offs made by insect vision systems in nature, we can design better vision systems for insect-scale robotics in a way that balances energy, computation, and mass. Here, we report a fully wireless, power-autonomous, mechanically steerable vision system that imitates head motion in a form factor small enough to mount on the back of a live beetle or a similarly sized terrestrial robot. Our electronics and actuator weigh 248 milligrams and can steer the camera over 60° based on commands from a smartphone. The camera streams “first person” 160 pixels–by–120 pixels monochrome video at 1 to 5 frames per second (fps) to a Bluetooth radio from up to 120 meters away. We mounted this vision system on two species of freely walking live beetles, demonstrating that triggering image capture using an onboard accelerometer achieves operational times of up to 6 hours with a 10–milliamp hour battery. We also built a small, terrestrial robot (1.6 centimeters by 2 centimeters) that can move at up to 3.5 centimeters per second, support vision, and operate for 63 to 260 minutes. Our results demonstrate that steerable vision can enable object tracking and wide-angle views for 26 to 84 times lower energy than moving the whole robot.

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In this paper, general in-plane trajectory tracking problem of a flexible beam is studied. To obtain the dynamic equations of motion of the beam, Hamiltonian dynamics is used and then Lagrange’s equations of beam dynamics and corresponding expressions for boundary conditions are derived. Resulting equations show that the coupled beam dynamics including beam vibration and its rigid in-plane motion take place in two different time domains. By using two-time scale (TTS) control theory, a control scheme is elaborated that makes the orientation and position of the mass center of the beam track a desired trajectory while suppressing its vibration. TTS composite controller has two parts: one is a tracking controller designed for the slow (rigid) subsystem, and the other one is a stabilizing controller for the fast (flexible) subsystem. For the fast subsystem, the proposed boundary control (BC) method does not require any information about vibration along the beam except at the end points, nor requires discretizing the partial differential equation of beam vibration to a set of ordinary differential equations. So, the method avoids the need for instruments to measure data from vibration of any point along the beam or designing an observer for estimating this information. Also, the proposed method prevents control spillover due to discretization. Simulation results show that fast BC is able to remove undesirable vibration of the flexible beam and the slow controller provides very good trajectory tracking with acceptable actuating forces/moments.

In this paper, the distributed control of a longitudinal platoon of vehicles with non‐uniform communication topology is studied. In the case of non‐uniform communication topology, some eigenvalues of the network's matrix may be complex which complicates the stability analysis of the platoon. Most previous studies on vehicular platooning focus mainly on uniform topologies such as uni‐directional, bi‐directional, and multi predecessors following. Since all eigenvalues of these topologies are real, the stability analysis can be performed in a straightforward manner. A third‐order linear differential model is employed to describe the upper‐level dynamics of each vehicle. The 3 N‐order closed‐loop dynamics of the platoon are decoupled to individual third‐order dynamics by presenting a new approach. Two new centralized and decentralized control protocols are introduced to perform the stability analysis of the closed‐loop dynamics. A constant time headway strategy is employed to adjust the inter‐vehicle spacing. Simulation results with different scenarios are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

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