Page 49 - FCW, September/October 2019

Quick, low-cost coverage
The name grew out of the team’s initial focus on hurricane response. The idea for Ducks came on the heels of hurri- canes Maria and Harvey, and the Ducks were being built as Hurricane Florence swept the Carolinas last September.
“We love the idea of calling them the Clusterduck network, not just because we thought it was comically relevant to the situations we would support, but also it speaks to the technical architec- ture — that we’ve really created a clus- tered mesh network of these Ducks,” Knouse said, adding that they might have to rename the networks as the company becomes more mainstream.
Each Duck is small — about the size of a baseball — and has a single button that turns the unit on or off. Within about a second of turning on a unit, it transmits using two wireless capabilities: Wi-Fi and LoRa, a spread spectrum modulation technique that can enable long-range transmissions.
“If you’re near a Duck, you’ll be able to open up your Wi-Fi settings on your phone or on your computer or on any internet-connected device and find our Wi-Fi network and connect to that Duck,” Knouse said. “Wi-Fi gives us an ability to really connect with all the consumer electronic devices that are already out there. We don’t have to give you a special type of phone; you can use whatever type of phone you already have.”
Once connected, a captive portal
opens on the user’s device and asks for the user’s name, location, needs and details about the local situation. Users submit the relevant information, and the Duck sends that information over long distances at a low power draw through LoRa to the Project Owl disas- ter management system.
By dropping dozens of Ducks in an area, “we can cover a large geographi- cal space very quickly at relatively low costs and provide communication to people throughout that region,” Knouse said. The Ducks are battery- powered and can last anywhere from a day to a week, he added.
Putting Clusterducks to the test
Project Owl conducted its first major field test in Puerto Rico in March. The company distributed about 60 Ducks in five regions, with the largest mesh net- work covering about one square mile. It took 15 minutes to deploy each Duck — power it on, place it and make sure it was working — and only about half the messages went through.
The team tried again with anoth- er large test deployment in Houston in June, where it deployed about 50 Ducks in one square mile. This time, it took 90 seconds to power up each device, and the network error rate dropped to 10%.
Knouse said he expects Project Owl and its Ducks to find uses out- side disaster response. The Defense Department has already expressed
interest in using the small, lightweight devices for Special Forces traveling in areas without traditional communica- tions infrastructure, he said. Officials at Customs and Border Protection have also asked about using them in subter- ranean environments at the southern U.S. border, although neither agency has formalized test plans yet.
Additionally, Knouse said he sees potential for adding sensors to Ducks that would detect smoke, gas or haz- ardous materials and thereby increase their value to users.
Last October, Project Owl won IBM’s 2018 Call for Code Global Chal- lenge, coming in first among 100,000 competitors. As a result, the startup got support from IBM’s Code and Response initiative, which seeks to put open-source technologies in the communities that need them most.
“Part of our technology is open source, meaning we said to the greater world wide web, ‘Hey, if this is some- thing that inspires you, if this is a prob- lem you’d like to work on, why don’t you jump into our Slack channel and you can work on this technology with us?’” Knouse said.
Last November, five people were in the channel. Today there are almost 170. “The most inspiring piece of this to me is the response we’ve seen from all the individuals across the world who are passionate about building new technology that can make a positive impact,” he said. n
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