Backscatter Communication for Wireless Robotic Materials

Abstract

Robotic Materials can change their physical properties programmatically by integrating sensing, actuation, computation and communication. The latter can be carried out by wireless devices that are distributed in a dense network within the material and that operate with energy harvested from the environment. Recent progress on backscatter communications enables devices that, assisted by an external unmodulated carrier, receive and transmit data at short range with sub-milliwatt power consumption. We term this communication paradigm carrier-assisted communications. In this work we propose carrier-assisted communications for robotic materials and employ simplified analytical models to study the necessary unmodulated carrier strength. We find that relaying a message over multiple hops requires less intense carriers than doing a single transmission. Additionally we find that multiple distributed carrier generations can further reduce the necessary output power of the individual carrier generators.