Monitoring aquatic debris is of great interest to the ecosystems, marine life, human health, and water transport. This paper presents the design and implementation of SOAR-a vision-based surveillance robot system that integrates an off-the-shelf Android smartphone and a gliding robotic fish for debris monitoring in relatively calm waters. SOAR features real-time debris detection and coverage-based rotation scheduling algorithms. The image processing algorithms for debris detection are specifically designed to address the unique challenges in aquatic environments. The rotation scheduling algorithm provides effective coverage for sporadic debris arrivals despite camera's limited angular view. Moreover, SOAR is able to dynamically offload compute-intensive processing tasks to the cloud for battery power conservation. We have implemented a SOAR prototype and conducted extensive experimental evaluation. The results show that SOAR can accurately detect debris in the presence of various environment and system dynamics, and the rotation scheduling algorithm enables SOAR to capture debris arrivals with reduced energy consumption.

Monitoring aquatic environment is of great interest to the ecosystem, marine life, and human health. This article presents the design and implementation of Samba—an aquatic surveillance robot that integrates an off-the-shelf Android smartphone and a robotic fish to monitor harmful aquatic processes such as oil spills and harmful algal blooms. Using the built-in camera of the smartphone, Samba can detect spatially dispersed aquatic processes in dynamic and complex environment. To reduce the excessive false alarms caused by the nonwater area (e.g., trees on the shore), Samba segments the captured images and performs target detection in the identified water area only. However, a major challenge in the design of Samba is the high energy consumption resulted from continuous image segmentation. We propose a novel approach that leverages the power-efficient inertial sensors on smartphones to assist image processing. In particular, based on the learned mapping models between inertial and visual features, Samba uses real-time inertial sensor readings to estimate the visual features that guide image segmentation, significantly reducing the energy consumption and computation overhead. Samba also features a set of lightweight and robust computer vision algorithms, which detect harmful aquatic processes based on their distinctive color features. Last, Samba employs a feedback-based rotation control algorithm to adapt to spatiotemporal development of the target aquatic process. We have implemented a Samba prototype and evaluated it through extensive field experiments, lab experiments, and trace-driven simulations. The results show that Samba can achieve a 94% detection rate, a 5% false alarm rate, and a lifetime up to nearly 2 months.

Monitoring aquatic environment is of great interest to the ecosystem, marine life, and human health. This paper presents the design and implementation of Samba -- an aquatic surveillance robot that integrates an off-the-shelf Android smartphone and a robotic fish to monitor harmful aquatic processes such as oil spill and harmful algal blooms. Using the built-in camera of on-board smartphone, Samba can detect spatially dispersed aquatic processes in dynamic and complex environments. To reduce the excessive false alarms caused by the non-water area (e.g., trees on the shore), Samba segments the captured images and performs target detection in the identified water area only. However, a major challenge in the design of Samba is the high energy consumption resulted from the continuous image segmentation. We propose a novel approach that leverages the power-efficient inertial sensors on smartphone to assist the image processing. In particular, based on the learned mapping models between inertial and visual features, Samba uses real-time inertial sensor readings to estimate the visual features that guide the image segmentation, significantly reducing energy consumption and computation overhead. Samba also features a set of lightweight and robust computer vision algorithms, which detect harmful aquatic processes based on their distinctive color features. Lastly, Samba employs a feedback-based rotation control algorithm to adapt to spatiotemporal evolution of the target aquatic process. We have implemented a Samba prototype and evaluated it through extensive field experiments, lab experiments, and trace-driven simulations. The results show that Samba can achieve 94% detection rate, 5% false alarm rate, and a lifetime up to nearly two months.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a novel user-initiated indoor localization system called QiLoc. QiLoc is a simple yet effective way to accurately locate and identify occupants of Qi-compatible devices inside buildings. The system is composed of QiLoc Stations and a QiLoc Server. A QiLoc Station is usually embedded inside or under a desk/table. By using the Qi wireless charging protocol, it can extract the unique ID of a charging device, thus locating the occupant. The QiLoc Server maintains the location information of all occupants, and provides a set of APIs via standard web services such as location, ad hoc group membership, and authentication. Using these primitives, QiLoc enables various smart home applications. We have deployed QiLoc in an office building and implemented a number of applications, including a smartphone app that identifies people in the same physical space, and a Windows-based notification system that provides live updates of colleagues' locations. We also demonstrate how QiLoc can enhance human interaction and productivity by integrating with industrial solutions like calendar, instant messaging, and email systems.

Data centers have become a critical computing infrastructure in the era of cloud computing. Temperature monitoring and forecasting are essential for preventing server shutdowns because of overheating and improving a data center’s energy efficiency. This article presents a novel cyber-physical approach for temperature forecasting in data centers, one that integrates Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling, in situ wireless sensing, and real-time data-driven prediction. To ensure forecasting fidelity, we leverage the realistic physical thermodynamic models of CFD to generate transient temperature distribution and calibrate it using sensor feedback. Both simulated temperature distribution and sensor measurements are then used to train a real-time prediction algorithm. As a result, our approach reduces not only the computational complexity of online temperature modeling and prediction, but also the number of deployed sensors, which enables a portable, noninvasive thermal monitoring solution that does not rely on the infrastructure of a monitored data center. We extensively evaluated the proposed system on a rack of 15 servers and a testbed of five racks and 229 servers in a small-scale production data center. Our results show that our system can predict the temperature evolution of servers with highly dynamic workloads at an average error of 0.52○C, within a duration up to 10 minutes. Moreover, our approach can reduce the required number of sensors by 67% while maintaining desirable prediction fidelity.

Water resources and aquatic ecosystems are facing increasing threats from climate change, improper waste disposal, and oil spill incidents. It is of great interest to deploy mobile sensors to detect and monitor certain diffusion processes (e.g., chemical pollutants) that are harmful to aquatic environments. In this paper, we propose an accuracy-aware diffusion process profiling approach using smart aquatic mobile sensors such as robotic fish. In our approach, the robotic sensors collaboratively profile the characteristics of a diffusion process including source location, discharged substance amount, and its evolution over time. In particular, the robotic sensors reposition themselves to progressively improve the profiling accuracy. We formulate a novel movement scheduling problem that aims to maximize the profiling accuracy subject to the limited sensor mobility and energy budget. We develop an efficient greedy algorithm and a more complex near-optimal radial algorithm to solve the problem. We conduct extensive simulations based on real data traces of GPS localization errors, robotic fish movement, and wireless communication. The results show that our approach can accurately profile dynamic diffusion processes under tight energy budgets. Moreover, a preliminary evaluation based on the implementation on TelosB motes validates the feasibility of deploying our profiling algorithms on mote-class robotic sensor platforms.

Monitoring important aquatic processes like harmful algal blooms is of increasing interest to public health, ecosystem sustainability, marine biology, and aquaculture industry. This article presents a novel approach to spatiotemporal aquatic field reconstruction using inexpensive, low-power mobile sensing platforms called robotic fish . Robotic fish networks are a typical example of cyber-physical systems where the design of cyber components (sensing, communication, and information processing) must account for inherent physical dynamics of the robots and the aquatic environment. Our approach features a rendezvous-based mobility control scheme where robotic fish collaborate in the form of a swarm to sense the aquatic environment in a series of carefully chosen rendezvous regions. We design a novel feedback control algorithm that maintains the desirable level of wireless connectivity for a sensor swarm in the presence of significant environment and system dynamics. Information-theoretic analysis is used to guide the selection of rendezvous regions so that the spatiotemporal field reconstruction accuracy is maximized subject to the limited sensor mobility. The effectiveness of our approach is validated via implementation on sensor hardware and extensive simulations based on real data traces of water surface temperature field and on-water ZigBee wireless communication.

Error correction is a fundamental problem in wireless system design as wireless links often suffer high bit error rate due to the effects of signal attenuation, multipath fading and interference. This paper presents a new cross-layer solution called LEAD to improve the performance of existing channel decoders. While the traditional wisdom of cross-layer design is to exploit physical layer information at upper-layers, LEAD represents a paradigm shift in that it leverages upper-layer protocol signatures to improve the performance of physical layer channel decoding. The approach of LEAD is motivated by two key insights. First, channel codes can correct more errors when the values of some bits, which we refer to as {\em pilots}, are known before decoding. Second, some header fields of upper-layer protocols are often fixed or highly biased toward certain values. These distinctive bit pattern signatures can thus be exploited as pilots to assist channel decoding. To realize this idea, we first characterize bit bias in real-life network traffic, and develop an efficient algorithm to extract pilot bits with assured prediction accuracy. We then propose a decoding framework to allow existing channel decoders to effectively exploit extracted pilots. We implement LEAD on GNURadio/USRP platform and evaluate its performance by replaying real-life packet traces on a testbed of 12 USRP links. Our results show that LEAD significantly improve wireless link performance, while incurring very low overhead. Specifically, LEAD reduces more than 90\% bit errors for 48.9\% packets, and improves the end-to-end link throughput by 1.43x to 1.93x over existing error correction schemes.

Water resources and aquatic ecosystems are facing increasing threats from climate change, improper waste disposal, and oil spill incidents. It is of great interest to deploy mobile sensors to detect and monitor certain diffusion processes (e.g., chemical pollutants) that are harmful to aquatic environments. In this paper, we propose an accuracy-aware diffusion process profiling approach using smart aquatic mobile sensors such as robotic fish. In our approach, the robotic sensors collaboratively profile the characteristics of a diffusion process including source location, discharged substance amount, and its evolution over time. In particular, the robotic sensors reposition themselves to progressively improve the profiling accuracy. We formulate a novel movement scheduling problem that aims to maximize the profiling accuracy subject to limited sensor mobility and energy budget. We develop an efficient greedy algorithm and a more complex near-optimal radial algorithm to solve the problem. We conduct extensive simulations based on real data traces of robotic fish movement and wireless communication. The results show that our approach can accurately profile dynamic diffusion processes under tight energy budgets. Moreover, a preliminary evaluation based on the implementation on TelosB motes validates the feasibility of deploying our movement scheduling algorithms on mote-class robotic sensor platforms.

Data centers have become a critical computing infrastructure in the era of cloud computing. Temperature monitoring and forecasting are essential for preventing overheating-induced server shutdowns and improving a data center's energy efficiency. This paper presents a novel cyber-physical approach for temperature forecasting in data centers, which integrates Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling, in situ wireless sensing, and real-time data-driven prediction. To ensure the forecasting fidelity, we leverage the realistic physical thermodynamic models of CFD to generate transient temperature distribution and calibrate it using sensor feedback. Both simulated temperature distribution and sensor measurements are then used to train a real-time prediction algorithm. As a result, our approach significantly reduces the computational complexity of online temperature modeling and prediction, which enables a portable, noninvasive thermal monitoring solution that does not rely on the infrastructure of monitored data center. We extensively evaluated our system on a rack of 15 servers and a test bed of five racks and 229 servers in a production data center. Our results show that our system can predict the temperature evolution of servers with highly dynamic workloads at an average error of 0.52C, within a duration up to 10 minutes.

Monitoring important aquatic processes like harmful algal blooms is of increasing interest to public health, ecosystem sustainability, marine biology, and aquaculture industry. This paper presents a novel approach to spatiotemporal aquatic field reconstruction using inexpensive, low-power, mobile sensing platforms called robotic fish. Robotic fish networks are a typical example of Cyber-Physical Systems where the design of cyber components (sensing, communication, and information processing) must account for inherent physical dynamics of the robots and the aquatic environment. Our approach features a rendezvous-based mobility control scheme where robotic fish collaborate in the form of a swarm to sense the aquatic environment in a series of carefully chosen rendezvous regions. We design a novel feedback control algorithm that maintains the desirable level of wireless connectivity for a sensor swarm in the presence of significant environment and system dynamics. Information-theoretic analysis is used to guide the selection of rendezvous regions so that the spatiotemporal field reconstruction accuracy is maximized subject to the limited sensor mobility. The effectiveness of our approach is validated via implementation on sensor hardware and extensive simulations based on real data traces of water surface temperature field and on-water ZigBee wireless communication.