Written by Adam Dunkels,
Tuesday, 28 November 2006
Over 200 people have died in Europe as result of tunnel fires in the last decade. Can networked embedded systems assist fire fighters when a traffic accident causes a fire inferno inside a road tunnel? The RUNES project is building technology that helps locate both the burning veichles and people trapped inside the tunnel. The system is composed of small wireless networked sensors running Contiki.
It is 2012. A traffic accident happens in a 30 year old road tunnel. The tunnel has been equipped with wireless sensors that monitor the tunnel and as the traffic accident turns into a fire inferno the sensors immediately alert the fire fighters. When the fire breaks out the wireless sensors must adapt to the new scenario: locate the fire and people trapped inside the tunnel. The sensors do this by dynamically downloading new software components with the assistance of Contiki.
The RUNES project has developed a lightweight component-based middleware platform that can operate over multiple heterogeneous nodes - from the very resource-constrained and upwards. Contiki runs on the most resource-constrained nodes and allows the component-based middleware to use dynamically loaded modules and services.
