Aug. 5, 2002 - Monitoring the mating habits of Leach's Storm Petrel, a seabird native to the western North Atlantic, is like chasing ghosts. The petrels spend most of their lives in offshore waters and return to land only during the breeding season. They nest in burrows in soft, loose soil and are active around breeding colonies only in the late evening. If researchers disturb the birds, they will often abandon their nests, leaving their eggs vulnerable.

Breeding ground sensor

Researchers at the College of the Atlantic have found a unique way around the problem. In May, they placed a dozen sensors – fist-sized devices in a box -- around the petrels' breeding grounds on Great Duck Island, a 200-acre spit of land about an hour and a half south of Bar Harbor, Maine, by boat. The devices have infrared, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and sound sensors. They are networked wirelessly and can transmit data to an 802.11b wireless hub. From there, the information is uploaded to the Internet via satellite. Since the researchers placed six more sensors in burrows in July, they have been able to monitor the birds in their natural habitat without ever setting foot on the island.

The petrel project is one of the first real-world applications for wireless sensors developed by the Intel Research Laboratory at Berkeley. The lab, an unusual cooperative research project between a private company and a university, was opened in the spring of 2001 and is led by Prof. David Culler. The aim of the project is to develop inexpensive sensors that can organize themselves into ad hoc networks and provide information about the physical world to information systems. Culler calls the sensors "motes" because they may one day be as small as dust motes. Intel refers to the technology as "sensor nets."

Whatever you call them, the sensors are part of the new branch of computer science that aims to link the physical and digital worlds. Sensor nets use radio waves for wireless communication, but the focus of the research is not on identification. These are not networked RFID tags. But sensor nets could benefit companies in ways that RFID can't.