Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Energy from the environment provides a long-lasting energy supply for sensor tags in tracking systems.
In the Daedalus project, our positioning, navigation, and energy management experts and the DFKI Robotics Innovation Center have combined satellite-based navigation (with relative positioning in wireless sensor networks) with a technique known as energy harvesting that supplies energy to tracking tags.
In April 2017, Daedalus experts gave a live presentation of the results to the project’s sponsors and participants, and the tracking tag is already being optimized and tested for industrial applications and logistics scenarios. The tracking components have a modular structure and can be adapted flexibly to suit potential application scenarios. Depending on requirements, the tracking module can be equipped with a wide range of energy converters, such as solar cells, thermoelectric generators, and vibration harvesters. Energy harvesting can be used to obtain small quantities of electrical energy from the environment. Depending on the environmental conditions, the maintenance costs for battery replacement in positioning and data transmission are very low, so that the tags can achieve unlimited operating times.