Toothbrush ATC: US air traffic on a toothbrush CPU

An author simulates a full day of US IFR air traffic, consisting of 45,000 flights, by running conflict detection and resolution solves on an emulated ESP32-C3 microcontroller chip, which is the same hardware found in a Wi-Fi toothbrush. Using exact instruction counts and pessimistic cycle models, the solver kernel executed successfully in SRAM without flash-cache misses. The project explores utilizing off-the-shelf low-cost microcontrollers to handle complex tracking and resolution tasks. Open article →