The Bridge - Issue 1, 2022 - 23

Graduate Research SP
Demetris Anquez Coleman
Xi, Michigan State University,
Ph.D. Student in Electrical Engineering
RESEARCH TOPIC
Control of Gliding Robotic Fish and Application to Environmental Sensing
Marine scientists study the ocean and other marine environments to help predict weather, maintain healthy ecosystems for marine
life, test the safety of freshwater sources for human consumption, and much more. In the past, this work required time-consuming
data collection by the scientist before analyzing the data. In my work, I develop robotic systems and algorithms to help automate data
collection and environmental monitoring. The robots are designed to also be capable of real-time data analysis for informative/intelligent
sensing, exploration, and long-term autonomy.
TLIGHT
Team of Gliding Robotic Fish
Gliding Robotic Fish Swimming in Higgins Lake
LEARN MORE
www.egr.msu.edu/~xbtan/sml_index.html
Miniature Gliding Robotic Fish Testing Control
Algorithms in Indoor Tank
CONTACT
smlab.msu.edu
Colleen Josephson
Beta Theta, Stanford University, PhD in Electrical Engineering
RESEARCH TOPIC
Enabling Low-power Ubiquitous Sensing with RF Backscatter
The goal of Colleen's research is to build scalable sensing systems for sustainability. Her work
explores how RF backscatter can serve as a tool for designing low-power sensor networks. RF
backscatter is the phenomenon of incident RF reflecting from the surface of a material back toward
the source. This can be used to implement an extremely low-power communication system.
Because backscatter communication consumes an order of magnitude less power than traditional
wireless radios, backscatter-based sensor networks can be deployed in areas where there is
insufficient power or communication infrastructure to support traditional sensor networks.
Colleen's contributions include designing novel sensors and sensing paradigms for agriculture,
inventing techniques for ultra-low power communication for indoor sensor networks, and exploiting
non-traditional energy sources, such as microbes. Her most recent work examines how to accurately
sense soil moisture with RF using ultra-wideband (UWB) backscatter tags. Despite decades of
research confirming the benefits, most farms do not incorporate soil moisture sensing into their
irrigation practices because of the high costs, and the difficulty of deploying and maintaining the
sensors. A backscatter-based approach, however, achieves the same accuracy as state-of-the-art
commercial grade soil moisture sensors, but at a fraction of the projected infrastructure cost and
maintenance load.
LEARN MORE
https://cjosephson.net/
CONTACT
cajoseph@alumni.stanford.edu
A comparison of traditional agricultural
sensor networks vs. the future vision of
using underground backscatter tags.
3D range-Doppler image after
correlating an underground backscatter
tag return signal.
HKN.ORG
23

https://www.egr.msu.edu/~xbtan/sml_index.html http://smlab.msu.edu https://www.cjosephson.net/ https://hkn.ieee.org/

The Bridge - Issue 1, 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Bridge - Issue 1, 2022