Cognitive Ultra-low Power Sensor System (CUPSS)

The Navy's role in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) has necessitated a variety of activities that require long-term, reliable intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance. For tactically relevant applications, the endurance and performance tradeoff remain the limiting factors in determining how long sensing and analytic capabilities can remain operative while unattended. In this proposal, Intelligent Automatic Inc. (IAI http://i-a-i.com) in collaboration with University of Michigan, propose a novel sensing system called Cognitive Ultra-low Power Sensor System (CUPSS). CUPPS has the following features and innovations: 1) A multimodal sensing node with wireless fencing capability supported by ultra low power (pW-nW), compact Phoenix hardware platform which leverages a comprehensive sleep strategy. 2) A Cognitive sensor management framework for heterogeneous, sensor modalities; sensed events; and signal propagation which allows for smart sensor positioning and power management. 3) A hierarchical sensor placement and fusion architecture to efficiently reduce model complexity and uncertainty and to identify friendly encounters from threat intrusions and 4) A sensor middleware supporting hardware and algorithm abstraction and software wizards to rapidly integrate new sensors, and easily update the sensor sleep/trigger hierarchy and rules by a non-technical human operator.