This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to develop a solution for wireless communication in an environment hostile to radio frequency. Ultrawide band (UWB) impulse radio is used to create a robust communication link for both periodically transmitting sensors and mission-critical event indicators. The solution has to be low cost and power efficient. Low cost will allow massive deployment in vehicles, sensor networks, and monitoring devices in industrial plants. This proposal makes it possible to build a system consisting of a completely passive radio that uses UWB as the reverse link to an interrogator to realize robust, safe and reliable communication in a challenging environment.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is the replacement of copper in home, office, and in particular vehicles. The application of this project which extends the benefit of passive radio is numerous: radio frequency identification (RFID), automotive, consumer electronics, home, and factory automations. Modern automotive industry is increasingly relying on advanced electronics which is actually a reliance on a heavy and expensive material: copper. The advent of Hybrid and electric cars will only increase this need. More than 55 pounds of copper is used in a typical U.S.-built automobile and this number is increasingly larger in more featureful cars. These numbers and benefits are even greater when extended to wirings inside homes, offices and industrial plants. All switches, sensors, data points and control levers can be substituted by radio links. The proposed approach of building a passive, ultra-low power system will change the way a vehicle is designed, built, and tested. It significantly reduces the cost and the associated overhead of copper wires.
The objective of this project is to develop a robust and reliable ultrawide band (UWB) based passive radio solution to be used in an automotive environment. Use of passive radios not only allows for removal of communication copper lines between sensors and indicators and switches and actuators, but also eliminates the need for power lines to the radio device. However, such a solution needs to be reliable, robust and perform in a "dense" environment such as a vehicle where hundreds of wireless actuators, sensors and switches operate at high bandwidth and in real-time. Aside from saving fuel and copper as well as providing augmented safety, additional benefits of the proposal are ease of installation, deployment, and upgrading of sensors and switches. The sensor/switch unit in this proposal will be a single tiny monolithic element that can be assembled, removed and replaced in quite the same way as a simple screw or an adhesive tag; an important strength of this approach is that adding sensors, switches and end-effectors are not subject to limitations of the legacy design, since these elements would not require any wirings through the legacy structure. Let’s look at a personal vehicle to demonstrate a concrete case. A car comprises two kinds of electrical control elements: Switches and sensors Actuators, including speakers and displays Switches and sensors are units that generate the signals that need to be attended to immediately in real time, albeit at different sampling intervals. Actuators and displays are such devices that act as the end-effectors of a control system. In the particular case of a car, there is a very large number of switches that request a change of status. Power windows, door locks, trunk switches, and the channel buttons on the car stereo are typically single-bit switches, whereas stereo volume, AC and cruise controls may represent data and status in longer binary formats. We anticipate that the proposed technology will cause a considerable number of switches to move to the areas that are immediately accessible to the driver. The steering wheel will be a very attractive place for many switches and as the wiring integrity and cost of harnessing the wires through the steering wheel disappear, the manufacturers will use more and more sophisticated elements in the steering wheel. Sensors that are engaged in closed loop operations deliver data in regular intervals and in longer formats, while warning and monitoring sensors are event-driven and typically request status changes in the driver user interface. The former are e.g. rotary encoders that are used in servo motors, knobs and gauges, but also such elements like proximity and inertial sensors. The latter comprise a host of sensors for brakes, tires, oil pressure, liquid levels, EGR valve, Check engine system, door ajar, fuel gauge, TCS, seat belts, battery charge, etc. By removing all the control wiring from the wiring harness of the car, the only wiring that will be left in the car will be the +12V wire. All other wirings can be removed, resulting in a huge saving in copper –a very expensive, heavy, and environmentally challenging metal—and saving this weight will also lead to saving a lot of fuel. Each switch contains a tiny UWB transmitter that is powered up by narrowband RF propagated by a central reader. The latter manages the whole network as well. The car stereo contains a UWB receiver that responds to the transmitted UWB signals from a volume button. When a switch is pushed the UWB transmitter sends a packet to the receiver. The receiver can be a centralized receiver that listens to all UWB communications and routes them to the corresponding actuators or can be distributed to the actuators themselves.
