Camaroptera

Abstract

Batteryless image sensors present an opportunity for pervasive widespread remote sensor deployments that require little maintenance and have low cost. However, the reliance of these devices on energy harvesting presents tight constraints in the quantity of energy that can be stored and used, as well as limited, energydependent availability. In this work, we develop Camaroptera, the first batteryless, energy-harvesting image sensing platform to support active, long-range communication. Camaroptera reduces the high latency and energy cost of communication by using nearsensor processing pipelines to identify interesting images and transmit them to a faraway base station, while discarding uninteresting images. Camaroptera also dynamically adapts its processing pipeline to maximize system availability and responsiveness to interesting events in different harvesting conditions. We fully prototype the Camaroptera hardware platform in a compact, 2cm x 3cm x 5cm volume, composed of three adjoined circuit boards. We evaluate Camaroptera demonstrating the viability of a batteryless remote sensing platform in a small package. We show that compared to a system that transmits all image data, Camaroptera's processing pipelines and adaptive processing scheme captures and sends 2-5X more images of interest to an application. CCS CONCEPTS • Computer systems organization → Sensor networks; Embedded software; • Hardware → Wireless integrated network sensors; • Computing methodologies → Object detection; Neural networks.

Automatically enforcing fresh and consistent inputs in intermittent systems

“…After a system-specific amount of energy accumulates, hardware activates the system to begin executing, quickly consuming the energy (green segments). The executing system may collect sensor inputs, run computations (e.g., machine learning to process sensor data [16,17,38]) on an ultra-low-power CPU or microcontroller, and log or transmit results via a wireless radio link.…”

Intermittent Computing Emulation of Ultralow-Power Processors: Evaluation of Backup Strategies for RISC-V

“…The non-functional properties such as power consumption and sustainability emerge as a crucial challenge standing in front of the future IoT applications [2], [3]. Thanks to the progress in energy harvesting circuits and the decrease in power requirements of processing, sensing, and communication hardware, we have the potential of freeing the IoT devices from their batteries [4]. However, removing batteries introduces frequent power failures due to the irregular power availability from the environment, that are not experienced when the amount of energy storage is not an issue [5].…”

Visible Light Communication for Intermittent Computing Battery-Less IoT Devices

“…However, to consolidate the spread of battery-less devices, several aspects must be considered. First, the alternative energy source should exploit various energy harvesting technologies relying on the surrounding environmental energy sources (such as light and solar [4], radio-frequency (RF) [5], bacteria species [6]). As the energy source is not always available and can be considered as sporadic, the battery-less device must deal with frequent power failures and so intermittent operations [7,8].…”