Humans of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Vijay Rao

PhD candidate Vijay Rao obtained his doctorate on October 16th with his thesis Ambient-Energy Powered Multi-Hop Internet of Things. He was supervised by Ignas Niemegeers and R.R. Venkatesha Prasad of our Embedded Systems group.

With the proliferation of IoT technologies, ambient-energy harvesting to power and make the devices battery-less is the only way forward for sustainability

Vijay: “My work revolves around power-management for wireless sensor networks that are powered by ambient-energy sources. I work on a battery-less version of the IoT by harvesting energy from sources such as sun or indoor lights. Ambient-energy harvesting is the only way forward to create an IoT infrastructure that is sustainable as batteries are not sustainable and it is a hassle to have to replace them over and over again.

I personally like the IoT as it can our lives a whole lot easier with automating most of our daily tasks. Technologies that are invisible will be the ones that will remain and must be reachable easily, no matter where I am. Speaking of whereabouts, I am working as a postdoc at TU Delft at the moment and I would like to carry on with research on this exciting topic.”