ETH Zurich : Computer Science : Information Systems : Distributed Systems : Research : Smart-Its

The project's goal is to develop unobtrusive, deeply interconnected smart devices - called Smart-Its - that can be attached to everyday items in order to support new functionality, novel interaction patterns and intelligent collaborative behavior. Smart-Its will be as cheap, as unobtrusive and as generic as state-of-the-art smart labels (i.e., radio tags), but in addition they will also be able to communicate with peers, and they will be customizable in their behavior. In order to facilitate a meaningful integration in their environment, Smart-Its are equipped with a broad range of different sensors providing context information. This context information is distributed among collections of Smart-Its and thus permits collaborative evaluation of collected data. Smart-Its will possess perceptive computing capabilities.

All necessary Smart-Its parts - embedded sensors, the microcontroller unit for information processing, technologies for ad-hoc wireless communication and the power supply - are being packaged in a unit approaching the form factor of a sticker. Attached to an object, Smart-Its provide the object with sensor-based self-awareness which can be customized to derive context information that is meaningful in the object's domain of use.

Overall, the following main research objectives are going to be addressed in the project:

• Embedded device development
• Development of perceptual computing methods for collective perception
• Development of an infrastructure for smart devices
• Architectures for context-awareness
• Evaluation of application scenarios

The Smart-Its project is one of 16 projects conducted under the European Union's Disappearing Computer initiative within the Future and Emerging Technologies programme. As such it belongs to the IST programme and is funded by the European Commission as well as by the Swiss government. Besides the Distributed Systems Group five research institutions across Europe are involved in the project: the Perceptual Computing and Computer Vision Group (ETH), the Computing Department at Lancaster University (U.K.), TecO (Germany), PLAY (Sweden), and VTT (Finland).

Please refer to the main project page for an in-depth project description.

Besides the Distributed Systems Group, the Perceptual Computing and Computer Vision Group at ETH Zurich is involved in the Smart-Its project. The main objective of our group is to develop and evaluate communication patterns and possible infrastructures for interconnected embedded technologies in general and for Smart-Its in specific.

Communication between Smart-Its can take place by using RF technologies. The utilization of Bluetooth seems to be a good option, but some questions remain open. Problems like power consumption of Bluetooth devices, for example, and their integration in embedded systems with narrow memory constraints have to be addressed.

We presume that Smart-Its will require a background infrastructure in order to access distributed services, connect to remote devices, or exchange application-specific information. Among others, such services include location and security services as well as services for the propagation of context information. Smart-Its only develop their inherent potential when acting in a collaborative environment together with other Smart-Its providing different sensor information and services. It is clear that in such an open and dynamic environment, service discovery and remote configuration are important issues that have to be addressed. Our group tries to investigate these and related research issues.

The Smart-Its project is only one constituent in the Distributed Systems Group's various research activities in the area of Ubiquitous Computing.

In the scope of a diploma thesis a first Smart-Its pre-prototype has been built in cooperation with the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory at ETH Zurich (a picture of this device can be seen below). It is based on Atmel's ATmega103L microcontroller with 128 kB of in-system programmable flash memory and only 4 kB of SRAM. Furthermore, Ericsson's Bluetooth modules allow communication between different devices.

An application that keeps track of the topology of a wireless network consisting of a collection of such devices shows the applicability of underlying concepts. More information on this prototype, the realized features and software parts can be found here.

• Kay Römer, Oliver Kasten, Friedemann Mattern
  Middleware Challenges for Wireless Sensor Networks.
  To appear in ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communication Review (MC2R)
  Abstract, full paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Frank Siegemund
  Spontaneous Interaction in Ubiquitous Computing Settings using Mobile Phones and Short Text Messages.
  Workshop on Supporting Spontaneous Interaction in Ubiquitous Computing Settings, Ubicomp 2002, Göteborg, Sweden, September 2002.
  Abstract, Full paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Frank Siegemund
  Smart-Its on the Internet - Integrating Smart Objects into the Everyday Communication Infrastructure.
  Technical note, September 2002.
  Full paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Frank Siegemund, Michael Rohs
  Rendezvous Layer Protocols for Bluetooth-Enabled Smart Devices.
  To appear: Proc. 1st International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems - Trends in Network and Pervasive Computing, ARCS, April 2002, © Springer-Verlag
  Abstract, Full paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Frank Siegemund
  Kontextbasierte Bluetooth-Scatternetz-Formierung in ubiquitären Systemen.
  Proc. First German Workshop on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, March 2002
  Abstract, Full paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Oliver Kasten, Marc Langheinrich
  First Experiences with Bluetooth in the Smart-Its Distributed Sensor Network.
  Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing and Communications,
  In: Proc. PACT 2001, Oct. 2001
  Full paper (.pdf, .ps )
  
  
• Jan Beutel, Oliver Kasten
  A Minimal Bluetooth-Based Computing and Communication Platform.
  Technical Note, May 2001
  Full paper (.pdf, .ps )
  
  
• Lars Erik Holmquist, Friedemann Mattern, Bernt Schiele, Petteri Alahuhta, Michael Beigl, Hans-W. Gellersen
  Smart-Its Friends: A Technique for Users to Easily Establish Connections between Smart Artefacts.
  Proc. Ubicomp 2001, Springer-Verlag LNCS 2201, pp. 273-291, 2001
  Full paper (.ps, .pdf)
  
  
• Thomas Moser, Lukas Karrer
  The EventCollector Concept: Distributed Infrastructure for Event Generation & Dissemination in Ad Hoc Networks
  Diploma thesis, ETH Zurich, March 2001
  Full paper (.pdf)