CAREER: Enabling Dynamic, Adaptive, and Reliable Battery-free Embedded Computing

Tiny energy harvesting computers tap into the sun, radio waves, vibration, and other sources to power all their sensing, computing, and communication tasks. By leaving batteries behind, these devices can function maintenance-free, potentially for decades, enabling numerous applications in the Internet-of-Things around healthcare (wearable and body sensor networks), defense, ecology, horticulture, infrastructure, wildlife tracking, space exploration, and many other areas where long-term, low cost, massive scale sensing is essential. These battery-free devices lose power frequently because of fluctuations in energy availability, these power failures reset volatile state, including time, which makes programming, debugging, and deployment challenging, even for the expert. If people beyond the expert developer-such as hobbyists, domain scientists, nurses, consumers, and industry–are going to use these devices, the platforms must enable interaction, be intuitive, powerful, and easy to use, programming languages need to be familiar, and tools must be transparent, general and comprehensive. This proposal seeks to shrink the knowledge and tools gap between the expert and the lay person in developing applications for intermittently powered devices, by providing new hardware, tools, and high level programming abstractions for deployment of interactive and invisible batteryless smart devices in the real world.