skip to main content
10.1145/3643832.3661868acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmobisysConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Open access

SoilCares: Towards Low-cost Soil Macronutrients and Moisture Monitoring Using RF-VNIR Sensing

Published: 04 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Accurate measurements of soil macronutrients (i.e., nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) and moisture play a key role in smart agriculture. However, existing commodity soil sensors are often expensive and the achieved accuracy is unsatisfactory. To address these issues, we present SoilCares, a low-cost soil sensing system enabling accurate and simultaneous monitoring of the concentration levels of soil moisture and macronutrients. SoilCares overcomes key challenges of accommodating diverse soil types and soil textures by introducing a novel membrane-based scheme. For moisture sensing, SoilCares leverages the multi-modal fusion of RF and NIR signals to significantly increase the sensing accuracy. Through delicate hardware design, we enable negligible-cost sensor data transmission using the existing sensing hardware, building up a complete end-to-end soil sensing system. SoilCares is cost-effective ($63.5), portable (0.5 kg), and low-power (236 μW), making it suitable for insitu deployment. On-site experimental results show that SoilCares achieves high macronutrient sensing accuracy with a low RMSE of 0.138, and extremely low moisture estimation error of 1%, outperforming the state-of-the-art research and expensive commodity moisture sensors on the market.

References

[1]
Francisco Albornoz. 2016. Crop responses to nitrogen overfertilization: A review. Scientia horticulturae 205 (2016), 79--83.
[2]
Arm. 2012. BCM2835 ARM Peripherals. https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/bcm2835/bcm2835-peripherals.pdf
[3]
Aroya 2023. SUBSTRATE SENSOR. https://aroya.io/en/aroya-sensors/products/substrate-sensor
[4]
Ebrahim Babaeian, Morteza Sadeghi, Scott B Jones, Carsten Montzka, Harry Vereecken, and Markus Tuller. 2019. Ground, proximal, and satellite remote sensing of soil moisture. Reviews of Geophysics 57, 2 (2019), 530--616.
[5]
Sneha J Bansod and Shubhada S Thakare. 2014. Near Infrared spectroscopy based a portable soil nitrogen detector design. Int. J. Comput. Sci. Inf. Technol 5, 3 (2014), 3953--3956.
[6]
Elisabetta Barberis, Franco Ajmone Marsan, R Scalenghe, A Lammers, U Schwertmann, AC Edwards, R Maguire, MJ Wilson, A Delgado, and J Torrent. 1995. European soils overfertilized with phosphorus: Part 1. Basic properties. Fertilizer research 45 (1995), 199--207.
[7]
Marion F Baumgardner, LeRoy F Silva, Larry L Biehl, and Eric R Stoner. 1986. Reflectance properties of soils. Advances in agronomy 38 (1986), 1--44.
[8]
Bimedis.com [n. d.]. Spectrometer. https://bimedis.com/a-item/spectroscopy-equipment-bfrl-wqf-510-1946874
[9]
bngesp. [n. d.]. MQTTSN-over-LoRA. https://github.com/bngesp/MQTTSN-over-LoRA
[10]
PR Bullock, X Li, and L Leonardi. 2004. Near-infrared spectroscopy for soil water determination in small soil volumes. Canadian journal of soil science 84, 3 (2004), 333--338.
[11]
Hans Büning-Pfaue. 2003. Analysis of water in food by near infrared spectroscopy. Food Chemistry 82, 1 (2003), 107--115.
[12]
Richard J Cameron, Chandra M Kudsia, and Raafat R Mansour. 2018. Microwave filters for communication systems: fundamentals, design, and applications. John Wiley & Sons.
[13]
Zhaoxin Chang, Fusang Zhang, Jie Xiong, Junqi Ma, Beihong Jin, and Daqing Zhang. 2022. Sensor-free soil moisture sensing using lora signals. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 6, 2 (2022), 1--27.
[14]
Xiaohui Chen, Xiaojun Yan, Mingkuang Wang, Yuanyang Cai, Xuefan Weng, Da Su, Jiuxin Guo, Weiqi Wang, Yong Hou, Delian Ye, et al. 2022. Long-term excessive phosphorus fertilization alters soil phosphorus fractions in the acidic soil of pomelo orchards. Soil and Tillage Research 215 (2022), 105214.
[15]
ATMA Choudhury and IR Kennedy. 2005. Nitrogen fertilizer losses from rice soils and control of environmental pollution problems. Communications in soil science and plant analysis 36, 11-12 (2005), 1625--1639.
[16]
M Demiss, Sh Beyene, and S Kidanu. 2020. Comparison of soil extractants and spectral reflectance measurement for estimation of available soil potassium in some Ethiopian soils. Eurasian Soil Science 53 (2020), 1100--1109.
[17]
Analog DevicesDevices. [n. d.]. HMC849A Datasheet and Product Info | Analog Devices. https://www.analog.com/en/products/hmc849a.html#product-overview
[18]
Nandkishor M Dhawale, Viacheslav I Adamchuk, R Viscarra, S Prasher, Joann K Whalen, and A Ismail. 2013. Predicting extractable soil phosphorus using visible/near-infrared hyperspectral soil reflectance measurements. Paper No. 13 47 (2013).
[19]
Digikey. 2023. 915MHz Bandpass Filter. https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/rf-filters/844?s=N4IgjCBcoEwdIDGUBmBDANgZwKYBoQB7KAbRAGYwB2ATgFYAOEAXQIAcAXKEAZQ4CcAlgDsA5iAC%2BBMORpRQySOmz4ipCgAYN5GFRbsukXgJHiJ5oA.
[20]
Jian Ding and Ranveer Chandra. 2019. Towards low cost soil sensing using Wi-Fi. In The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. 1--16.
[21]
Dragino [n. d.]. Arduino Shield featuring LoRa® technology. https://www.dragino.com/products/lora/item/102-lora-shield.html
[22]
Yuda Feng, Yaxiong Xie, Deepak Ganesan, and Jie Xiong. 2022. LTE-Based Low-Cost and Low-Power Soil Moisture Sensing. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. 421--434.
[23]
Yuhong Gao, Yaping Xie, Hanyu Jiang, Bing Wu, and Junyi Niu. 2014. Soil water status and root distribution across the rooting zone in maize with plastic film mulching. Field Crops Research 156 (2014), 40--47.
[24]
Tiziano Gomiero, David Pimentel, and Maurizio G Paoletti. 2011. Is there a need for a more sustainable agriculture? Critical reviews in plant sciences 30, 1-2 (2011), 6--23.
[25]
Shuang Gu, Gaohong He, Xuemei Wu, Zhengwen Hu, Leilei Wang, Gongkui Xiao, and Lin Peng. 2010. Preparation and characterization of poly (vinylidene fluoride)/sulfonated poly (phthalazinone ether sulfone ketone) blends for proton exchange membrane. Journal of applied polymer science 116, 2 (2010), 852--860.
[26]
Jon H Hardesty and Bassam Attili. 2010. Spectrophotometry and the BeerLambert Law: An important analytical technique in chemistry. Collin College, Department of Chemistry (2010).
[27]
Richard R Harwood. 2020. A history of sustainable agriculture. In Sustainable agricultural systems. CRC Press, 3--19.
[28]
Yong He, Shupei Xiao, Pengcheng Nie, Tao Dong, Fangfang Qu, and Lei Lin. 2017. Research on the optimum water content of detecting soil nitrogen using near infrared sensor. Sensors 17, 9 (2017), 2045.
[29]
Stefanie Heinze, Michael Vohland, Rainer Georg Joergensen, and Bernard Ludwig. 2013. Usefulness of near-infrared spectroscopy for the prediction of chemical and biological soil properties in different long-term experiments. Journal of Plant Nutrition and Soil Science 176, 4 (2013), 520--528.
[30]
T Hussain, MA Gondal, ZH Yamani, and MA Baig. 2007. Measurement of nutrients in green house soil with laser induced breakdown spectroscopy. Environmental monitoring and assessment 124 (2007), 131--139.
[31]
Christopher Hutengs, Michael Seidel, Felix Oertel, Bernard Ludwig, and Michael Vohland. 2019. In situ and laboratory soil spectroscopy with portable visible-to-near-infrared and mid-infrared instruments for the assessment of organic carbon in soils. Geoderma 355 (2019), 113900.
[32]
Mohd Javaid, Abid Haleem, Ibrahim Haleem Khan, and Rajiv Suman. 2023. Understanding the potential applications of Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture Sector. Advanced Agrochem 2, 1 (2023), 15--30.
[33]
Qingxu Jin and Victor C Li. 2019. Development of lightweight engineered cementitious composite for durability enhancement of tall concrete wind towers. Cement and Concrete Composites 96 (2019), 87--94.
[34]
Scott B Jones, JM Blonquist, David A Robinson, V Philip Rasmussen, and Dani Or. 2005. Standardizing Characterization of Electromagnetic Water Content SensorsPart 1. Methodology. Vadose Zone Journal 4, 4 (2005), 1048--1058.
[35]
Richard B Keithley, R Mark Wightman, and Michael L Heien. 2009. Multivariate concentration determination using principal component regression with residual analysis. TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry 28, 9 (2009), 1127--1136.
[36]
Usman Mahmood Khan and Muhammad Shahzad. 2022. Estimating Soil Moisture Using RF Signals. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing And Networking (Sydney, NSW, Australia) (MobiCom '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 242--254.
[37]
Anja Klotzsche, François Jonard, Majken Caroline Looms, Jan van der Kruk, and Johan A Huisman. 2018. Measuring soil water content with ground penetrating radar: A decade of progress. Vadose Zone Journal 17, 1 (2018), 1--9.
[38]
J Ledieu, P De Ridder, P De Clerck, and S Dautrebande. 1986. A method of measuring soil moisture by time-domain reflectometry. Journal of Hydrology 88, 3-4 (1986), 319--328.
[39]
Jiaqi Li, Qingxu Jin, Wenxin Zhang, Chen Li, and Paulo JM Monteiro. 2022. Microstructure and durability performance of sustainable cementitious composites containing high-volume regenerative biosilica. Resources, Conservation and Recycling 178 (2022), 106038.
[40]
Tuti Mariana Lim, M Ulaganathan, and Q Yan. 2015. Advances in membrane and stack design of redox flow batteries (RFBs) for medium-and large-scale energy storage. In Advances in Batteries for Medium and Large-Scale Energy Storage. Elsevier, 477--507.
[41]
Weidong Liu, Frédéric Baret, Xingfa Gu, Bing Zhang, Qingxi Tong, and Lanfen Zheng. 2003. Evaluation of methods for soil surface moisture estimation from reflectance data. International Journal of Remote Sensing 24, 10 (2003), 2069--2083.
[42]
David B Lobell and Gregory P Asner. 2002. Moisture effects on soil reflectance. Soil Science Society of America Journal 66, 3 (2002), 722--727.
[43]
Mila Ivanova Luleva, Harald Van der Werff, Victor Jetten, and Freek Van der Meer. 2011. Can infrared spectroscopy be used to measure change in potassium nitrate concentration as a proxy for soil particle movement? Sensors 11, 4 (2011), 4188--4206.
[44]
DF Malley, L Yesmin, and RG Eilers. 2002. Rapid analysis of hog manure and manure-amended soils using near-infrared spectroscopy. Soil Science Society of America Journal 66, 5 (2002), 1677--1686.
[45]
SA Materechera and HR Mloza-Banda. 1997. Soil penetration resistance, root growth and yield of maize as influenced by tillage system on ridges in Malawi. Soil and Tillage Research 41, 1-2 (1997), 13--24.
[46]
Thomas G Mayerhöfer, Susanne Pahlow, and Jürgen Popp. 2020. The bouguerbeer-Lambert law: Shining light on the obscure. ChemPhysChem 21, 18 (2020), 2029--2046.
[47]
Charles E Miller. 2001. Chemical principles of near-infrared technology. Near-infrared technology in the agricultural and food industries 2 (2001).
[48]
Abdul Mounem Mouazen, Josse De Baerdemaeker, and Herman Ramon. 2005. Towards development of on-line soil moisture content sensor using a fibre-type NIR spectrophotometer. Soil and Tillage Research 80, 1-2 (2005), 171--183.
[49]
Subra Mukherjee and Shakuntala Laskar. 2019. Vis-NIR-based optical sensor system for estimation of primary nutrients in soil. Journal of Optics 48, 1 (2019), 87--103.
[50]
Agus Arip Munawar, Yuswar Yunus, Purwana Satriyo, et al. 2020. Calibration models database of near infrared spectroscopy to predict agricultural soil fertility properties. Data in Brief 30 (2020), 105469.
[51]
Cargele Nduwamungu, Noura Ziadi, L-É Parent, Gaetan F Tremblay, and Laurent Thuriès. 2009. Opportunities for, and limitations of, near infrared reflectance spectroscopy applications in soil analysis: A review. Canadian Journal of Soil Science 89, 5 (2009), 531--541.
[52]
Shaojun Qiu, Jiagui Xie, Shicheng Zhao, Xinpeng Xu, Yunpeng Hou, Xiufang Wang, Wei Zhou, Ping He, Adrian M Johnston, Peter Christie, et al. 2014. Long-term effects of potassium fertilization on yield, efficiency, and soil fertility status in a rain-fed maize system in northeast China. Field crops research 163 (2014), 1--9.
[53]
T.S. Rappaport. 2002. Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice. Prentice Hall PTR. https://books.google.com/books?id=TbgQAQAAMAAJ
[54]
Source Code Raspberry Pi. 2021. Clock Driver. https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/tree/rpi-6.1.y/drivers/clk
[55]
RA Viscarra Rossel, DJJ Walvoort, AB McBratney, Leslie J Janik, and JO Skjemstad. 2006. Visible, near infrared, mid infrared or combined diffuse reflectance spectroscopy for simultaneous assessment of various soil properties. Geoderma 131, 1-2 (2006), 59--75.
[56]
RTL-SDR.com [n. d.]. rtl-sdr. https://gitea.osmocom.org/sdr/rtl-sdr
[57]
Aliou Saïdou, I Balogoun, EL Ahoton, AM Igué, S Youl, G Ezui, and A Mando. 2018. Fertilizer recommendations for maize production in the South Sudan and Sudano-Guinean zones of Benin. Improving the Profitability, Sustainability and Efficiency of Nutrients Through Site Specific Fertilizer Recommendations in West Africa Agro-Ecosystems: Volume 2 (2018), 215--234.
[58]
M Schärer, C Stamm, T Vollmer, E Frossard, A Oberson, H Flühler, and S Sinaj. 2007. Reducing phosphorus losses from over-fertilized grassland soils proves difficult in the short term. Soil Use and Management 23 (2007), 154--164.
[59]
Yongni Shao and Yong He. 2011. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium prediction in soils, using infrared spectroscopy. Soil Research 49, 2 (2011), 166--172.
[60]
Prem P Sharma, Vikrant Yadav, Swati Gahlot, Oksana V Lebedeva, Alexandra N Chesnokova, Divesh N Srivastava, Tatiana V Raskulova, and Vaibhav Kulshrestha. 2019. Acid resistant PVDF-co-HFP based copolymer proton exchange membrane for electro-chemical application. Journal of membrane science 573 (2019), 485--492.
[61]
Olya Skulovich and Pierre Gentine. 2023. A long-term consistent artificial intelligence and remote sensing-based soil moisture dataset. Scientific data 10, 1 (2023), 154.
[62]
GC Starr, B Lowery, and ET Cooley. 2000. Soil water content determination using a network analyzer and coaxial probe. Soil Science Society of America Journal 64, 3 (2000), 867--872.
[63]
M Stehlík, A Czako, M Mayerová, and M Madaras. 2019. Influence of organic and inorganic fertilization on soil properties and water infiltration. (2019).
[64]
Bo Stenberg, Raphael A Viscarra Rossel, Abdul Mounem Mouazen, and Johanna Wetterlind. 2010. Visible and near infrared spectroscopy in soil science. Advances in agronomy 107 (2010), 163--215.
[65]
S Svanberg. 2012. Atomic and Molecular Spectroscopy: Basic Aspects and Practical Applications, 6 Springer Science & Business Media. Berlin, Heidelberg (2012).
[66]
H Tomlinson, A Traore, and ZJFE Teklehaimanot. 1998. An investigation of the root distribution of Parkia biglobosa in Burkina Faso, West Africa, using a logarithmic spiral trench. Forest ecology and management 107, 1-3 (1998), 173--182.
[67]
G Clarke Topp, JL Davis, and Aa P Annan. 1980. Electromagnetic determination of soil water content: Measurements in coaxial transmission lines. Water resources research 16, 3 (1980), 574--582.
[68]
Guangjing Wang, Qiben Yan, Shane Patrarungrong, Juexing Wang, and Huacheng Zeng. 2023. FacER: Contrastive Attention based Expression Recognition via Smartphone Earpiece Speaker. In IEEE INFOCOM 2023-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. IEEE, 1--10.
[69]
Guangjing Wang, Lan Zhang, Zhi Yang, and Xiang-Yang Li. 2018. Socialite: Social activity mining and friend auto-labeling. In 2018 IEEE 37th International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC). IEEE, 1--8.
[70]
Ju Wang, Liqiong Chang, Shourya Aggarwal, Omid Abari, and Srinivasan Keshav. 2020. Soil moisture sensing with commodity RFID systems. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. 273--285.
[71]
Juexing Wang, Guangjing Wang, Xiao Zhang, Li Liu, Huacheng Zeng, Li Xiao, Zhichao Cao, Lin Gu, and Tianxing Li. 2023. PATCH: A Plug-in Framework of Non-blocking Inference for Distributed Multimodal System. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 7, 3 (2023), 1--24.
[72]
Juexing Wang, Xiao Zhang, Li Xiao, and Tianxing Li. 2023. Survey for Soil Sensing with IOT and Traditional Systems. Network 3, 4 (2023), 482--501.
[73]
Wikipedia. 2023. Snell's law --- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Snell's%20law&oldid=1158093539. [Online; accessed 13-June-2023].
[74]
Yong Yang, Ying Chen, Xiaolan Zhang, Edwin Ongley, and Lei Zhao. 2012. Methodology for agricultural and rural NPS pollution in a typical county of the North China Plain. Environmental Pollution 168 (2012), 170--176.
[75]
Khairunnisa Mohd. Yusof, Suhaila Isaak, Nor Hafizah Ngajikin, and Nurfatihah Che Abd Rashid. 2016. LED based soil spectroscopy.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. SoilCares: Towards Low-cost Soil Macronutrients and Moisture Monitoring Using RF-VNIR Sensing

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    MOBISYS '24: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services
    June 2024
    778 pages
    ISBN:9798400705816
    DOI:10.1145/3643832
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

    Sponsors

    In-Cooperation

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 04 June 2024

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. smart agriculture
    2. pervasive sensing
    3. multi-modality
    4. soil sensing low-power and low-cost sensing

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    MOBISYS '24
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)789
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)139
    Reflects downloads up to 28 Dec 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all

    View Options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Login options

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media