scientist with beakers
Smartdust is a term used to describe groups of very small robots that can be used for monitoring and detection. Currently, smart dust scale is quite small, with single sensors the size of a deck of cards, but the hope is to have robots as small as a speck of dust. Individual smart dust sensors are often referred to as specks due to their small size. These devices are also known as MEMS, which stands for microelectromechanical sensors.
Smartdust has theoretical applications in virtually all fields of science and industry. Research into the technologies is well-funded and robust, and it is generally accepted that it is simply a matter of time before smart dust functionally exists. Opponents question the risks to personal privacy, but advocates argue that the drawbacks are far outweighed by the positive benefits.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been heavily funding smart dust research since the late 1990s, seeing virtually limitless applications in the sphere of modern warfare. So far, the research has been promising, with smart dust sensor prototypes down to 5mm. Costs have come down rapidly with technological innovations, bringing individual particles down to less than $50 each, with the hope of dropping to less than $1 per speck in the near future.
The applications of these sensors seem endless. Every aspect of life that one examines opens up new avenues for smart dust. Smart dust could eventually be used to monitor traffic and direct it better, to track soldiers and alert them to any poisons or dangerous biological substances in the air, to track people and track their activities, to track defects in bespoke products that come off an assembly line, and even to enter human bodies and check for physiological problems.
Energy use is an important area of research in the field of smart dust. With devices this small, batteries add a huge amount of weight. Therefore, it is important to use absolutely minimal amounts of energy to communicate the collected data to central hubs where it can be accessed by humans.
The development of smart dust continues at breakneck speed and no doubt it will soon be common to have a vast army of thousands or millions of nearly invisible sensors monitoring our environment to ensure our safety and the efficiency of the machines around us.