DARPA SensIT Demo

The Sensorwebs / SmartDust / TinyOS group went to the high desert last week as part of a DARPA Information Technology Office Sensor Information Technology demo. The purpose of the demo was to bring together the various principal investigators and show the progress made for FY-2001.

The Berkeley team consisted of Prof. Kris Pister, Jason Hill (who left a week earlier to make that everything works), Robert Szewczyk, Lance Doherty and Julius Kusuma. We're joined by Steve Morris' team from Spyplanes.com, who will provide air support.

What were we trying to accomplish? The big plan is to have Steve's plane drop some motes along a stretch of road at the Marine Corps Air-to-Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC), have the motes synchronize and form an ad-hoc network, and track vehicles passing by. The motes will estimate the direction and velocity of the passing vehicles, log the data, and then beam it up to the plane so that it could be sent to the base station. Sounds crazy? Watch us accomplish this.

	The MCAGCC is the largest marine training grounds in the US. It provides a large stretch of land for combined-arms exercises, up to divisional size. It's located right by the town of 29Palms, which is northeast of the LA area. It's also conveniently close to the Joshua Tree National Park.
In order to accommodate the demo, the Marines graciously "lent" us several heavy vehicles and few good marines. Here are the heavy vehicles that I'm talking about: the Humvee, the 5-ton truck and the Dragon Wagon (which can be used to haul an M-1A1 tank for better fuel economy than the tank carrying itself around).

This is a view of where our "main base" is located in the desert.

The motes >>>