Luca Mottola

64Key: A Mesh-based Collaborative Plaform

We present 64Key, a hardware/software platform that enables impromptu sensing, data sharing, collaborative working, and social networking among physically co-located users independently of their own hardware platform, operating system, network stack, and of the availability of Internet access. 64Key caters to those scenarios such as computer labs, large conferences, and emergency situations where the network infrastructure is limited in operation or simply not available, and peer-to-peer interactions are prevented or not possible. By plugging a 64Key device in ones mobile device USB port, an independent network is created on the fly, which users access from their own device though a web-based interface. In addition to default apps such as chat, file sharing, and collaborative text editing, 64Keys functionality may be extended through the run-time installation of third-party apps, available at a public app store. We demonstrate our proof-of-concept implementation of 64Key with multiple apps in a set of key scenarios.

Fundamental concepts of reactive control for autonomous drones

Autonomous drones represent a new breed of mobile computing system. Compared to smartphones and connected cars that only opportunistically sense or communicate, drones allow motion control to become part of the application logic. The efficiency of their movements is largely dictated by the low-level control enabling their autonomous operation based on high-level inputs. Existing implementations of such low-level control operate in a time-triggered fashion. In contrast, we conceive a notion of reactive control that allows drones to execute the low-level control logic only upon recognizing the need to, based on the influence of the environment onto the drone operation. As a result, reactive control can dynamically adapt the control rate. This brings fundamental benefits, including more accurate motion control, extended lifetime, and better quality of service in end-user applications. Based on 260+ hours of real-world experiments using three aerial drones, three different control logic, and three hardware platforms, we demonstrate, for example, up to 41% improvements in motion accuracy and up to 22% improvements in flight time.

Demo: Battery-free Visible Light Sensing

We present our efforts to design the first Visible Light Sensing (VLS) system that consumes only tens of μWs of power to sense and communicate. We achieve this by designing a sensing mechanism that uses solar cells to achieve sub-μWs of power consumption for sensing. Further, we devise an ultra-low power backscatter-based transmission mechanism we call Scatterlight that transmits digital readings without incurring the processing and computation overhead of existing sensors. We demonstrate our preliminary prototype that detects and transmits three simple hand gestures.

Poster Abstract: A Benchmark for Low-power Wireless Networking

Experimental research in low-power wireless networking lacks a reference benchmark. While other communities such as databases or machine learning have standardized bench-marks, our community still uses ad-hoc setups for its exper-iments and struggles to provide a fair comparison between communication protocols. Reasons for this include the di-versity of network scenarios and the stochastic nature of wireless experiments. Leveraging on the excellent testbeds and tools that have been built to support experimental val-idation, we make the case for a reference benchmark to pro-mote a fair comparison and reproducibility of results. This abstract describes early design elements and a benchmark-ing methodology with the goal to gather feedback from the community rather than propose a definite solution.