I talked with Roland Arca, CEO of Arch Rock, a company in San Francisco founded by UC Berkeley scientists who developed TinyOS and TinyDB along with the Berkeley Mote-all essential technologies for tiny, inexpensive, wireless sensors.
I bet I've heard it a hundred times over the past seven years that the potential of the Internet has barely been tapped. As soon as "we" can get billions of small embedded computers to talk directly on the Internet, then things will really take off. The payoff for industrial control would be the ability to sense and measure lots more stuff than we do now. With more measurements there could be better control. Not just of processes, but of business elements like cost and profitability.
At any rate, Arch Rock has acquired $5 million of venture money and the technology and Arch Rock founder Dr. David Culler were mentioned in the latest MIT Technology Review.
Wireless sensor networks are collections of tiny logic-based sensors that can monitor almost anything-such as light, motion, proximity, temperature, biometrics and chemical substances-and are networked by forming wireless meshes using low-power radio. Arch Rock's Internet-enabled wireless sensor network solutions allow companies to apply business logic at all tiers of these sensor networks in order to easily capture new kinds of information from the physical world and harness that information through their enterprise software and Web Services applications.
"Our vision is that sensors will far outnumber computers and that the Internet architecture and value system is the way to scale," said Acra. "Multi-vendor hardware, networks spanning diverse links, and distributed applications-these are the principles around which the Internet has thrived. We will bring forward these principles and look forward to building a healthy ecosystem in order to scale wireless sensor networks for the benefit of our customers" said Acra.
I do think that something will come from all this development (whether ZigBee or other low power radio source, and whether it's called "mesh" or not) that will greatly aid manufacturing.
2:28:09 PM 
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