Precision agriculture demands continuous and accurate monitoring of soil moisture (M) and key macronutrients, including nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K), to optimize yields and conserve resources. Wireless soil sensing has been explored to measure these four components; however, current solutions require recalibration (i.e., retraining the data processing model) to handle variations in soil texture, characterized by aluminosilicates (Al) and organic carbon (C), limiting their practicality. To address this, we introduce SoilX, a calibration-free soil sensing system that jointly measures six key components: M, N, P, K, C, Al. By explicitly modeling C and Al, SoilX eliminates texture- and carbon-dependent recalibration. SoilX incorporates Contrastive Cross-Component Learning (3CL), with two customized terms: the Orthogonality Regularizer and the Separation Loss, to effectively disentangle cross-component interference. Additionally, we design a novel tetrahedral antenna array with an antenna-switching mechanism, which can robustly measure soil dielectric permittivity independent of device placement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SoilX reduces estimation errors by 23.8
LoRa networks have been deployed in many orchards for environmental monitoring and crop management. An accurate propagation model is essential for efficiently deploying a LoRa network in orchards, e.g., determining gateway coverage and sensor placement. Although some propagation models have been studied for LoRa networks, they are not suitable for orchard environments, because they do not consider the shadowing effect on wireless propagation caused by the ground and tree canopies. This paper presents FLog, a propagation model for LoRa signals in orchard environments. FLog leverages a unique feature of orchards, i.e., all trees have similar shapes and are planted regularly in space. We develop a 3D model of orchards. Once we have the location of a sensor and a gateway, we know the media that the wireless signal traverses. Based on this knowledge, we generate the First Fresnel Zone (FFZ) between the sender and the receiver. The intrinsic path loss exponents (PLE) of all media can be combined into a classic Log-Normal Shadowing model in the FFZ. Extensive experiments in almond orchards show that FLog reduces the link quality estimation error by 42.7% and improves gateway coverage estimation accuracy by 70.3%, compared with a widely used propagation model. The source codes and dataset are released at https://github.com/ycucm/Flog.
Precise robot localization at the tree level is essential for smart agriculture applications such as precision disease management and targeted nutrient distribution. Existing methods fail to achieve the required accuracy. We propose OrchLoc, a fingerprinting-based localization solution that achieves treelevel precision using a single Long Range (LoRa) gateway. Our approach utilizes channel state information (CSI) across eight channels as a localization fingerprint. To minimize labor-intensive site surveys for fingerprint database construction and maintenance, we develop a CSI generative model (CGM) that learns the relationship between CSI vectors and their corresponding locations. The CGM is fine-tuned using CSI data from static agricultural LoRa sensor nodes, enabling continuous fingerprint database updates. Extensive experiments in two orchards demonstrate that OrchLoc effectively achieves accurate tree-level localization with minimal overhead, improving robot navigation
Free-roaming VR which allows a group of users to navigate in rooms and even buildings, enhances the VR experience by making it more immersive and interactive. Streaming VR videos over wireless enables unconstrained experiences but raises unprecedented requirements in mobility, efficiency, and scalability. Existing solutions fail in one or more of the following challenges: maintaining low latency during handover, balancing loads on different APs, and stabilizing bitrate for competing users, due to their decentralized nature where each user lacks information about others and makes locally optimal decisions. To address these problems, we present MP2, a centralized VR streaming system that coordinates multiple Wi-Fi links and video bitrates among users for better QoE. A centralized controller collects cross-layer information from each user and makes better decisions based on global information. It achieves this in a timely manner through accurate modeling and the use of efficient pruning and partitioning algorithms. To our knowledge, MP2 is the first centrally coordinated VR streaming system that supports multi-user free-roaming. Comprehensive benchmarks including real-world tests, large-scale emulation, and trace-driven user studies, confirm the effectiveness of MP2 against state-of-the-art solutions. It achieves 35 x improvement in tail latency, 1.56 x in bitrate, and 1.86 x in QoE over state-of-the-art baselines. MP2 achieves up to a 99.1% improvement in mean opinion scores according to the user study.
We present GRaF, Generalizable Radio-Frequency (RF) Radiance Fields, a framework that models RF signal propagation to synthesize spatial spectra at arbitrary transmitter or receiver locations, where each spectrum measures signal power across all surrounding directions at the receiver. Unlike state-of-the-art methods that adapt vanilla Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to the RF domain with scene-specific training, GRaF generalizes across scenes to synthesize spectra. To enable this, we prove an interpolation theory in the RF domain: the spatial spectrum from a transmitter can be approximated using spectra from geographically proximate transmitters. Building on this theory, GRaF comprises two components: (i) a geometry-aware Transformer encoder that captures spatial correlations from neighboring transmitters to learn a scene-independent latent RF radiance field, and (ii) a neural ray tracing algorithm that estimates spectrum reception at the receiver. Experimental results demonstrate that GRaF outperforms existing methods on single-scene benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on unseen scene layouts.
Soil composition sensing is essential for precision agriculture, sustainable land management, and optimizing crop yields. However, existing sensing systems face major limitations, including extensive calibration needs to account for soil variability, a narrow focus on measurements for specific properties, and sensitivity to the placement of the device. These challenges hinder practical deployment. This demo shows SoilX, a comprehensive wireless soil sensing system that quantifies all major soil components-including aluminosilicates, water, organic carbon, and micronutrients-using RF and VNIR sensing technologies. To enable the generalizability, SoilX employs contrastive pretraining to mitigate cross-component interference. Additionally, a tetrahedron-based antenna geometry ensures robustness to device placements. Extensive evaluations in both lab and field settings demonstrate that SoilX achieves state-ofthe-art accuracy in soil composition analysis with low costs.
In orchards, tree-level localization of robots is critical for smart agriculture applications like precision disease management and targeted nutrient dispensing. However, prior solutions cannot provide adequate accuracy. We develop our system, a fingerprinting-based localization system that can provide tree-level accuracy with only one LoRa gateway. We extract channel state information (CSI) measured over eight channels as the fingerprint. To avoid labor-intensive site surveys for building and updating the fingerprint database, we design a CSI Generative Model (CGM) that learns the relationship between CSIs and their corresponding locations. The CGM is fine-tuned using CSIs from static LoRa sensor nodes to build and update the fingerprint database. Extensive experiments in two orchards validate our system's effectiveness in achieving tree-level localization with minimal overhead and enhancing robot navigation accuracy.
The rapid decline in groundwater around the world poses a significant challenge to sustainable agriculture. To address this issue, agricultural managed aquifer recharge (Ag-MAR) is proposed to recharge the aquifer by artificially flooding agricultural lands using surface water. Ag-MAR requires a carefully selected flooding schedule to avoid affecting the oxygen absorption of crop roots. However, current Ag-MAR scheduling does not take into account complex environmental factors such as weather and soil oxygen, resulting in crop damage and insufficient recharging amounts. This paper proposes MARLP, the first end-to-end data-driven control system for Ag-MAR. We first formulate Ag-MAR as an optimization problem. To that end, we analyze four-year in-field datasets, which reveal the multi-periodicity feature of the soil oxygen level trends and the opportunity to use external weather forecasts and flooding proposals as exogenous clues for soil oxygen prediction. Then, we design a two-stage forecasting framework. In the first stage, it extracts both the cross-variate dependency and the periodic patterns from historical data to conduct preliminary forecasting. In the second stage, it uses weather-soil and flooding-soil causality to facilitate an accurate prediction of soil oxygen levels. Finally, we conduct model predictive control (MPC) for Ag-MAR flooding. To address the challenge of large action spaces, we devise a heuristic planning module to reduce the number of flooding proposals to enable the search for optimal solutions. Real-world experiments show that MARLP reduces the oxygen deficit ratio by 86.8% while improving the recharging amount in unit time by 35.8%, compared with the previous four years.
Among the thriving ecosystem of cloud computing and the proliferation of Large Language Model (LLM)-based code generation tools, there is a lack of benchmarking for code generation in cloud-native applications. In response to this need, we present CloudEval-YAML, a practical benchmark for cloud configuration generation. CloudEval-YAML tackles the diversity challenge by focusing on YAML, the de facto standard of numerous cloud-native tools. We develop the CloudEval-YAML benchmark with practicality in mind: the dataset consists of hand-written problems with unit tests targeting practical scenarios. We further enhanced the dataset to meet practical needs by rephrasing questions in a concise, abbreviated, and bilingual manner. The dataset consists of 1011 problems that take more than 1200 human hours to complete. To improve practicality during evaluation, we build a scalable evaluation platform for CloudEval-YAML that achieves a 20 times speedup over a single machine. To the best of our knowledge, the CloudEval-YAML dataset is the first hand-written dataset targeting cloud-native applications. We present an in-depth evaluation of 12 LLMs, leading to a deeper understanding of the problems and LLMs, as well as effective methods to improve task performance and reduce cost.
This work presents ARD2, a framework that enables real-time through-wall surveillance using two aerial drones and an augmented reality (AR) device. ARD2 consists of two main steps: target direction estimation and contour reconstruction. In the first stage, ARD2 leverages geometric relationships between the drones, the user, and the target to project the target's direction onto the user's AR display. In the second stage, images from the drones are synthesized to reconstruct the target's contour, allowing the user to visualize the target behind walls. Experimental results demonstrate the system's accuracy in both direction estimation and contour reconstruction.
LoRa networks have been deployed in many orchards for environmental monitoring and crop management. An accurate propagation model is essential for efficiently deploying a LoRa network in orchards, e.g., determining gateway coverage and sensor placement. Although some propagation models have been studied for LoRa networks, they are not suitable for orchard environments, because they do not consider the shadowing effect on wireless propagation caused by the ground and tree canopies. This paper presents FLog, a propagation model for LoRa signals in orchard environments. FLog leverages a unique feature of orchards, i.e., all trees have similar shapes and are planted regularly in space. We develop a 3D model of the orchards. Once we have the location of a sensor and a gateway, we know the mediums that the wireless signal traverse. Based on this knowledge, we generate the First Fresnel Zone (FFZ) between the sender and the receiver. The intrinsic path loss exponents (PLE) of all mediums can be combined into a classic Log-Normal Shadowing model in the FFZ. Extensive experiments in almond orchards show that FLog reduces the link quality estimation error by 42.7% and improves gateway coverage estimation accuracy by 70.3%, compared with a widely-used propagation model.
This paper examines fault resilience among citizen-science air quality monitoring networks in California's economically challenged San Joaquin Valley (SJV). We examine disparities in monitoring capabilities and data equity between the SJV and the San Francisco Bay Area. We found significant inequities through experimental analysis simulating sensor failures. Our results emphasize the need for reliable monitoring systems and advanced modeling algorithms in resource-limited areas.