Scaling Cyber-Physical Systems to the Low-Power Internet of Things

Battery-free sensors are annually attached to billions of items including pharmaceutical drugs, clothes, and manufacturing parts. The fundamental challenge with these sensors is that they are only reliable at short distances. As a result, today’s systems for communicating with and localizing battery-free sensors are crippled by the limited range. This research proposes a cyber-physical system architecture that can overcome this challenge to enable sensing, communicating with, and localizing these sensors at an unprecedented scale.