The Waggle Platform is a research project at Argonne National Laboratory to design, develop, and deploy a novel wireless sensor platform with advanced edge computing capabilities to enable a new breed of sensor-driven environmental science and smart city research.

The Waggle project started in the summer of 2013, leveraging several Argonne wireless sensor projects going as far back as 2004, when Pete Beckman and Rick Stevens taught a wireless sensor class at the University of Chicago.  Pete then started a research lab for sensor networks and explored environmental sensing of data centers. Waggle was founded with internal Argonne research funds (LDRD).

The innovative architecture leverages emerging technology in low-power processors, sensors, and cloud computing to build powerful and reliable sensor nodes that can actively analyze and respond to data. Cloud computing provides elastic resources for storing and computing on data.

Waggle is designed from the ground up with security, privacy, extensability, and survivability as key design points. The Waggle reference platforms and software are launching points. All of the software is Open Source, and the software is modular, so researchers can add their own sensors, computing pipelines, and data analysis.

The name for the project comes from nature’s wireless sensors — honeybees. Bees search far and wide for pollen, and report their findings back to the hive using a sophisticated dance called a “waggle dance“. The dance encodes the distance and angle to the food source, and is often similar to a figure-8 — which is why we picked wa8.gl as our domain name.

The Waggle source code repository is here:   https://github.com/waggle-sensor

Our documentation is bit spread out, since the core Waggle software is used by so many different projects.  One good place to start is here:
https://docs.waggle-edge.ai

If you have questions about the research or would like to talk, please contact us!