the maple seed project

In this day and age, information is vital. The armed forces of our country have a continuing need to gather information in new and more efficient ways. This project addresses the problem of conducting battlefield reconnaissance in a manner that is safe and covert by developing a sensor package to gather information about the volatile area in which it is deployed while allowing retrieval of that information remotely. To conserve battery power, sensors lay dormant in the deployment area until sufficient stimulus is present, upon which they become active and begin relaying data. With this system, information is retrieved with little cost in energy, equipment, and risk to human life.

The overall scope of this project is to design and implement a prototype of an unmanned surveillance device capable of being air-deployed onto location (using auto-rotation to slow descent) and establishing a wireless network with other nearby devices in order to surveil a geographic region and relay information from peer devices to a remote command center. This prototype is to be a proof of concept to demonstrate the feasibility of a maple seed sensor network. These devices are be capable of independent, autonomous operation and self-organization (they may added to or removed from the network dynamically). Each unit will be placed in location by air-drop and will remain inactive until one of the networked devices receives input from its onboard sensors. At that point, the devices will work cooperatively to record information on activity in the monitored area.

"Harris is an international communications and information technology company serving government and commercial markets worldwide. Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the company has approximately $5 billion of annual revenue and 15,000 employees — including nearly 7,000 engineers and scientists. Harris is dedicated to developing best-in-class assured communications® products, systems, and services."

-Harris Corporation (Harris.com/about.html)

The 2010 Maple Seed team is comprised of three ME students, Cody Epperson, Stephen DeBlois, Kevin Malfa, and two EE students, Russell Ford, and Kyle Lackinger. We are happy to have the opportunity to work on one of the first joint ME/EE projects at the College of Engineering. We hope that with the help of our faculty and sponsor we will have a functional prototype and demonstration of our sensor device by the end of the spring semester.

Once a cluster of maple seed devices land at the target location, each seed acts in concert with neighboring seeds and utilizes its sensors to intelligently monitor an area. Each device is capable of automatic self-organization into a wireless ad-hoc network upon being activated. The purpose of establishing communication between devices is to relay information to the user. The user can interface wirelessly through a dongle node, either a wireless NIC (Network Interface Card) attached to the user's PC or a direct cable connection to any maple seed device in the network. Each node will serve as a router to forward data from one device to another and ultimately to the user interface requesting the information. This model enables the maple seeds to be sparsely spread across an area, where a device may only be in radio communications range of one other device. When the user connects to a node, a message is broadcast to all other nodes notifying them to begin reporting their sensor readings to this dongle node. When a device's sensors detect activity, a message is sent to the user via the dongle node. Additionally, each instance of sensor stimuli is logged in the device's internal memory so the user can connect and retrieve this information at a later time.

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