Auto-ID Labs & Field Intelligence Lab Sanjay Sarma

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Acknowledgments

  Dr. Christian Floerkemeier

  Dr. Stephen Ho

  Dr. Ajay Deshpande

  Dr. Bae-Ian Wu

  Ed Schuster

  Isaac Ehrenberg

  Stephen Samouhos

  Rahul Bhattacharyya

  Sumeet Kumar

  Kat Donnelly

  Ivan Sergeev

  Alberto Perez

  Austin Oehlerking

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Why RFID?

  The US supply chain has goods worth $4.3 trillion in inventory

  The counterfeit industry worldwide is at least $100 billion

  Medical errors kill 50,000-100,000 patients every year in the US

Impact:

  Over 1 billion EPC tags have been read

  Over 1000 companies have signed up

  Over $500M has been invested by venture capitals (and lost )

RFID Simulation Engine

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Simulating RFID

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Path loss and fading makes tags fickle

Meta Materials

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Cloaking Principle

J. B. Pendry, D. Schurig,2 D. R. Smith2 Science 23 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5781, pp. 1780 - 1782

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Cloaking Relies on Meta-Materials

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Enhancing Tag Performance on Metal using Meta-Materials

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Enhancing Tag Performance on Metal using Meta-Materials

Placing an UHF tag on coke requires ideally an 8 cm spacer

8 cm

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Enhancing Tag Performance on Metal using Meta-Materials

Our goal is to design a meta-material to “shrink” 8 cm to 1 mm

… and then develop a low-cost meta-material fabrication technique.

Goal: Develop a low-cost, high performance RFID tag in a convenient form factor

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Enhancing Tag Performance on Metal using Meta-Materials

  Current status: –  An early prototype validates our hypothesis –  Next steps will focus on

  developing metamaterial structures that are thinner   fabrication of the metamaterial

  Work is done on collaboration with MIT RLE

RFID antenna based sensors

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Beyond Identification: Low cost RFID sensors

∆

Beam in Loaded State

Load Beam in Unloaded State

Measuring displacements represents a common method to assess structural health

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Beyond Identification: Low cost RFID sensors

∆

Beam in Loaded State

Load Beam in Unloaded State

Conventional Approaches to measure displacement:

•  Wired sensors

•  Battery-powered wireless sensors

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Beyond Identification: Low cost RFID sensors

∆

Beam in Loaded State

Load Beam in Unloaded State

Use the tag antenna in conventional RFID tags as the displacement sensors:

•  Infinite life-time

•  Low cost

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∆

Metal Plate Load

•  Load applied – metal plate is close to tag •  Tag responds with a weak backscatter signal

Tag Antenna Based Sensing Principle

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Tag Antenna Based Sensing: Not Limited to Displacement Sensing

RFID Tag – Antenna Based Sensing

Temperature Monitoring

Touch

Light

Map any physical phenomenon RFID Tag Power Properties

Use conventional, low cost RFID tag ICs with custom tag antennas as low

cost sensors

Warehousing

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Fragmented Warehousing

Location-relaxed Storage allows 100% space utilization

Strict Organization has limitations on usage

?

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Beyond Identification: RFID

Missing Book: "Capital" by Marx, Engels 

Misplaced Book: "The General Theory of Employment,.." by 

Keynes 

Loc 

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NRTLS – Non Real-Time Location Systems

Vision: Zero Configuration Location System using Mobile Robot Mounted RFID Readers

Field Intelligence Labs

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Sensor Infrastructure

Sensors

Sampling Theory  Sensing Devices 

Communication  Motion Modules 

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Applications

Electricity  Micro‐metering 

Water &  

Agriculture Sensing 

Automobile  Logging 

City Negawatt Mining 

Behavioral  Sensing 

Home Energy Auditing 

Infrastructure Sensing 

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Early results: Electricity Micrometering

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Early Results: Home Energy Audits

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Early Results: Automobile Logging

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Early Results: Water

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Thank you