Camaroptera: a Batteryless Long-Range Remote Visual Sensing System, Harsh Desai (CMU-Lucia)

Wednesday October 30, 2019
Location: CIC 4th floor Panther Hollow Conference Room
Time: 4:30PM-6:00PM

Batteryless image sensors present an opportunity for pervasive wide-spread remote sensor deployments that require little maintenance and have low cost. However, these devices present tight constraints in the quantity of energy that can be stored and used, as the only solution to power the devices is relying on energy harvesting systems.

In this work, we develop Camaroptera, the first batteryless, energy-harvesting image sensing platform to support active, long-range communication. Camaroptera avoids the high latency and energy cost of communication using near-sensor processing pipelines that process captured images to identify interesting images, discarding uninteresting images, and transmitting interesting images to a far-away base station. Camaroptera’s software adaptively changes its software and hardware operating mode based on the level of energy available in the environment, selecting an operating mode that minimizes processing and energy collection latency. 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.

Harsh Desai is a second-year PhD student in the ECE department at CMU, advised by Brandon Lucia. His research interests are focused in the areas of ultra-low-power sensing systems, batteryless & intermittent computing systems, networked sensor systems. His work on Camaroptera was recently published in the EnsSys workshop to be held in November 2019. He also won a best demo award for demonstrating the Camaroptera system at the CONIX annual review meeting held in October 2019. Before joining CMU, he completed his MS in ECE from Clemson University (2018), and a BE in Electronics Engineering from the University of Mumbai (2015).