What is smart dust and how is it used?

Imagine a cloud of sensors, each the size of a grain of sand or even smaller, blown aloft by hurricane winds and relaying data on the storm to weather stations below. Picture an invisible sensor network embedded into a smart city’s roads to monitor traffic, road surface damage and identify available parking spaces – all in real time. Or billions of nanosensors distributed over forests and other areas with fire hazards to detect a fire at its very beginning. Or envision programmable smart dust that triggers an alarm signal when invisible microcracks are detected in a turbine blade.

Smart dust refers to wireless networks of sub-millimeter-scale autonomous computing and sensing platforms not larger than a grain of sand. Smart dust senses and records data about its environment such as light, temperature, sound, presence of toxins or vibrations, and transmits that data wirelessly to larger computer systems.

Smart dust is a vision of the networked future where intelligent networks of trillions of miniscule sensors continuously feel, taste, smell, see, and hear what is going on in their surrounding environment, communicate with each other and exchange information. Smart dust networks are the ultimate Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices.

 

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Source:  https://www.nanowerk.com/smartdust.php