This paper addresses the challenges of achieving optimal quality of information (QoI) in non-dedicated vehicular mobile crowdsensing (NVMCS) system, where vehicles not originally designed for sensing are leveraged to collect real-time data as they traverse urban environments. These challenges are exacerbated by the interrelated issues of sensing coverage, sensing reliability, and the inherently dynamic nature of participating vehicles. To tackle these challenges, we propose QUIDS, a QUality-informed Incentive-driven multi-agent Dispatching System, which ensures high sensing coverage and sensing reliability under budget constraints in NVMCS systems. QUIDS improves QoI by introducing a novel metric, Aggregated Sensing Quality (ASQ), designed to quantitatively capture the concept of QoI by integrating both sensing coverage and sensing reliability. Moreover, we develop a Mutually Assisted Belief-aware Vehicle Dispatching algorithm that estimates sensing reliability and allocates monetary incentives under uncertain vehicle conditions, thereby further improving ASQ. Evaluation using real-world data collected from a deployed NVMCS system in a metropolitan area demonstrates the effectiveness of QUIDS. The ASQ metric shows a 38% improvement over non-dispatching scenarios and a 10% enhancement over state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, QUIDS reduces reconstruction map errors by 39–74% across various reconstruction algorithms, validating its efficacy in improving QoI within NVMCS systems. Addressing the often-overlooked issue of sensing reliability in existing studies, the QUIDS system leverages non-dedicated vehicles and incorporates a quality-informed incentive-driven dispatching system to jointly optimize sensing coverage and sensing reliability. This enables low-cost, high-quality, and scalable urban environmental monitoring without the need for dedicated sensing infrastructure, and makes the system applicable to diverse smart-city scenarios such as traffic monitoring and environmental sensing.

A heterogeneous micro aerial vehicles (MAV) swarm consists of resource-intensive but expensive advanced MAVs (AMAVs) and resource-limited but cost-effective basic MAVs (BMAVs), offering opportunities in diverse fields. Accurate and real-time localization is crucial for MAV swarms, but current practices lack a low-cost, high-precision, and real-time solution, especially for lightweight BMAVs. We find an opportunity to accomplish the task by transforming AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures for BMAVs. However, translating this insight into a practical system is challenging due to issues in estimating locations with diverse and unknown localization errors of BMAVs, and allocating resources of AMAVs considering interconnected influential factors. This work introduces TransformLoc, a new framework that transforms AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures, specifically designed for low-cost and resource-constrained BMAVs. We design an error-aware joint location estimation model to perform intermittent joint estimation for BMAVs and introduce a similarity-instructed adaptive grouping-scheduling strategy to allocate resources of AMAVs dynamically. TransformLoc achieves a collaborative, adaptive, and cost-effective localization system suitable for large-scale heterogeneous MAV swarms. We implement and validate TransformLoc on industrial drones. Results show it outperforms all baselines by up to 68% in localization performance, improving navigation success rates by 60%. Extensive robustness and ablation experiments further highlight superiority of its design.

Gas source localization is pivotal for the rapid mitigation of gas leakage disasters, where mobile robots emerge as a promising solution. However, existing methods predominantly schedule robots’ movements based on reactive stimuli or simplified gas plume models. These approaches typically excel in idealized, simulated environments but fall short in real-world gas environments characterized by their patchy distribution. In this work, we introduce SniffySquad , a multi-robot olfaction-based system designed to address the inherent patchiness in gas source localization. SniffySquad incorporates a patchiness-aware active sensing approach that enhances the quality of data collection and estimation. Moreover, it features an innovative collaborative role adaptation strategy to boost the efficiency of source-seeking endeavors. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our system achieves an increase in the success rate by \(20\%+\) and an improvement in path efficiency by \(30\%+\) , outperforming state-of-the-art gas source localization solutions.

Urban particulate pollution presents considerable public health hazards, underscoring the need for effective control measures in various cities. This paper proposes SmartSpr, a physics-informed urban mobile sprinkler scheduling system designed for enhanced efficiency in reducing particulate pollution. SmartSpr incorporates a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN)-based model, enriched with Bayesian optimization, to accurately simulate the impact of mobile sprinklers on particulate matter (PM) dispersion. Building on this sprinkling effect model, a selective sprinkling strategy considering the replenish process is proposed. This strategy employs a sparsity-driven decoupling simulated annealing algorithm to refine sprinkler routes, prioritizing areas with substantial environmental benefits. Extensive field experiments and simulations have validated SmartSpr, demonstrating a 64.8% reduction in prediction error of SmartSpr's sprinkling model compared to the leading baseline and an 18% enhancement in pollutant reduction efficiency of the proposed scheduling algorithm.

Mobile air pollution sensing methods have emerged to collect air quality data with improved spatial and temporal resolutions. However, existing methodologies struggle to effectively process spatially mixed gas samples due to the highly dynamic fluctuations experienced by sensors, resulting in significant measurement deviations. We identify an opportunity to address this issue by exploring potential patterns within sensor measurements. To this end, we propose CatUA, a novel city-scale fine-grained air quality estimation system designed to deliver accurate mobile air quality data. First, we design AirBERT, a representation learning model specifically aimed at discerning mixed gas concentrations from sensor data. Second, we implement a Prompt-informed Training Strategy that leverages extensive unlabeled and minimal labeled city-scale data to enhance the performance of CatUA. Notably, the Auto-Prompt mechanism allows CatUA to conveniently acquire new knowledge tailored to specific downstream tasks. To ensure the practicality of CatUA, we have invested considerable effort in developing the software stack on our meticulously crafted Sensing Front-end, which has successfully gathered city-scale air quality data for over 1,200 hours. Experiments conducted on the collected data demonstrate that CatUA reduces sensing errors by 96.9% with a latency of only 44.9ms, outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline by 42.6%.