Sensory Transformation

Tiny smart sensors will increasingly be embedded in everyday objects and places, forming the basis for a sensory infrastructure. The one question in the entire survey on which the Fellows agreed the most was the proliferation of RFID-enabled devices. Ninety-five percent of respondents thought that this was likely, with almost two-thirds saying it would happen within the next 10 years. Most of the Fellows also foresee the widespread diffusion of “smart dust”—tiny wireless sensors that self-organize into ad hoc networks.

As computing and processing move off the desktop into everyday things and sensor networks become widespread, every object, every movement, and every interaction online become pieces of data to be endlessly communicated, stored, mined, and analyzed on countless levels. Pervasive sensor networks also open up new vistas for scientists and engineers to observe physical phenomena and react to them. “As we attach unique labels to more and more objects in our environment, our ‘inventory management’ systems must scale accordingly,” says Ken Goldberg, an IEEE Fellow and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “Comparing the required systems with today’s FedEx package tracking is like comparing the game of go with tic-tac-toe.”

Of course, this sensor-rich world also raises deep questions about personal privacy. Goldberg is exploring this in his own work involving telerobotic webcams that stream ultrahigh-resolution images and enable scientific fieldwork, for example, to be conducted remotely.

“Some engineers might think that it’s up to the politicians and lawyers to work out the privacy challenges,” he says. “But unless we see this from the beginning as an important technology problem to solve, we’ll wake up with tons of gadgets around us and nowhere to hide.”

Lightweight Infrastructure

During the 20th century, infrastructure networks were the most transformative technology for industrial nations and a powerful engine for economic growth. They were also the most complicated and expensive efforts of the time. In the next 50 years, new materials and information technologies will enable a shift from massive, centralized infrastructure networks to modular, scalable, lightweight grids.

MEMS will shift the scale of materials processing, perhaps making possible home-based miniature plants to generate power, process waste, and purify water. The components will be organized more efficiently, more flexibly, and more securely than the capital-intensive networks of the 20th century.

Already today, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, communication promises to disrupt the well-­established players and business models of telephony. And in the developing world, solar-powered Wi-Fi network hubs and ultralow-cost laptop computers are starting to bring the information age to rural communities. Also, in poorer regions, carbon nanotube filters are enabling the creation of portable personal water purification systems, about the size of a roll of paper towels, that do not require electricity.

And that’s just the beginning of the new, light infrastructure. Today, flipping on a light switch is an act of faith in the central utilities that serve our cities. They sell, we buy. However, distributed power systems could lead to energy markets where any of us can deal in juice.

“The power grid will become a tool to exchange energy from millions of individual sources instead of hundreds to thousands,” as it is today, writes IEEE Fellow Math Bollen, technical manager for electromagnetic compatibility and power at STRI AB, in Ludvika, Sweden.

Several Fellows also pointed to an array of alternative energy sources they think show potential—nuclear, wind, biomass—but there was no agreement on which one would dominate. Whatever our future sources of energy might be, expect energy-efficient devices to be in wide use. This includes light-emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of incandescent lightbulbs in home lighting and much more efficient photovoltaics, made possible by advances in nano­science and nanoengineering.

Meanwhile, software-defined radio will transform our communications systems, making them highly versatile, dynamic, and easily upgradable. Ideally, a single device would be able to navigate the wireless world’s diverse networks with their myriad protocols. Software-defined radios do this by using software instead of hardware to modulate radio signals. The Fellows expect widespread use of this radio technology in the next 10 years.

Small World

For nearly three decades, nanotechnology has been hyped as the “next big thing.” However, our survey suggests that the real small-world revolution will be a confluence of lots of little things, such as wee robots built from MEMS, bionanotechnology inspired by nature, and the continuation of Moore’s Law.

The integrated circuit industry has in many ways pioneered nanotechnology. Nearly half of the IEEE Fellows we surveyed believe that processors with 5-nanometer features will become commercially viable in two to five decades, and 22 percent think it’ll happen sooner.

Of course, entirely new chip architectures and manufacturing processes will affect these developments. “Self-assembly of materials and structures will be one of the ways to overcome the resolution limitations in the current lithography technology,” IEEE Fellow Shinji Okazaki, at the Association of Super-Advanced Electronics Technologies, in Tokyo, commented in the survey.

In the realm of the micromechanical, microrobotics may not be as far off as one might imagine. After an earthquake, swarms of ant-size microrobots may someday burrow through the rubble of a building searching for survivors or crawl onto the hull of a spacecraft to repair damage during a flight. In the decade after next, more than half of those polled expect microscale robotics to become viable and MEMS to be widely applied to internal medicine.

Will nanotechnology go further still, leading at last to medical nanobots coursing through our bloodstreams, à la 1966’s Fantastic Voyage? Not so fast, say the Fellows.

“At the nanoscale, fundamental issues of coordination and communication remain and, in particular, the control of collections of self-organizing robots,” Howard Chizeck, professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, wrote in his survey response. “This is especially true for the control of nanomedical systems.”

Eventually, you may not even need to contract with a factory manufacturer to build microrobots or many other small tech-enabled devices, from RFID tags to flexible displays. Modified inkjet printers loaded with conductive nanocrystal inks have been demonstrated, hinting at a future when you can print your own electronics. Combine this technology with next-generation three-dimensional printers currently used in prototyping and you get a fab lab right on your desk.