Camaroptera: a Batteryless Long-Range Remote Visual Sensing System

Abstract

Batteryless image sensors present an opportunity for pervasive wide-spread remote sensor deployments that require little maintenance and have low cost. However, the reliance of these devices on energy harvesting presents tight constraints in the quantity of energy that can be stored and used, as well as limited, energy-dependent availability. In this work, we develop Camaroptera, the first batteryless, energy-harvesting image sensing platform to support active, long-range communication. Camaroptera reduces the high latency and energy cost of communication by using near-sensor processing pipelines to identify interesting images and transmit them to a far-away base station, while discarding uninteresting images. Camaroptera also dynamically adapts its processing pipeline to maximize system availability and responsiveness to interesting events in different harvesting conditions. We fully prototype the Camaroptera hardware platform in a compact, 2cm x 3cm x 5cm volume, composed of three adjoined circuit boards. We evaluate Camaroptera demonstrating the viability of a batteryless remote sensing platform in a small package. We show that compared to a system that transmits all image data, Camaroptera's processing pipelines and adaptive processing scheme captures and sends 2-5X more images of interest to an application.