Juan A. López

Wireless Sensor Networks for Oceanographic Monitoring: A Systematic Review

Monitoring of the marine environment has come to be a field of scientific interest in the last ten years. The instruments used in this work have ranged from small-scale sensor networks to complex observation systems. Among small-scale networks, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are a highly attractive solution in that they are easy to deploy, operate and dismantle and are relatively inexpensive. The aim of this paper is to identify, appraise, select and synthesize all high quality research evidence relevant to the use of WSNs in oceanographic monitoring. The literature is systematically reviewed to offer an overview of the present state of this field of study and identify the principal resources that have been used to implement networks of this kind. Finally, this article details the challenges and difficulties that have to be overcome if these networks are to be successfully deployed.

Development of a sensor node for precision horticulture.

This paper presents the design of a new wireless sensor node (GAIA Soil-Mote) for precision horticulture applications which permits the use of precision agricultural instruments based on the SDI-12 standard. Wireless communication is achieved with a transceiver compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The GAIA Soil-Mote software implementation is based on TinyOS. A two-phase methodology was devised to validate the design of this sensor node. The first phase consisted of laboratory validation of the proposed hardware and software solution, including a study on power consumption and autonomy. The second phase consisted of implementing a monitoring application in a real broccoli (Brassica oleracea L. var Marathon) crop in Campo de Cartagena in south-east Spain. In this way the sensor node was validated in real operating conditions. This type of application was chosen because there is a large potential market for it in the farming sector, especially for the development of precision agriculture applications.

A Low-Cost Sensor Buoy System for Monitoring Shallow Marine Environments

Monitoring of marine ecosystems is essential to identify the parameters that determine their condition. The data derived from the sensors used to monitor them are a fundamental source for the development of mathematical models with which to predict the behaviour of conditions of the water, the sea bed and the living creatures inhabiting it. This paper is intended to explain and illustrate a design and implementation for a new multisensor monitoring buoy system. The system design is based on a number of fundamental requirements that set it apart from other recent proposals: low cost of implementation, the possibility of application in coastal shallow-water marine environments, suitable dimensions for deployment and stability of the sensor system in a shifting environment like the sea bed, and total autonomy of power supply and data recording. The buoy system has successfully performed remote monitoring of temperature and marine pressure (SBE 39 sensor), temperature (MCP9700 sensor) and atmospheric pressure (YOUNG 61302L sensor). The above requirements have been satisfactorily validated by operational trials in a marine environment. The proposed buoy sensor system thus seems to offer a broad range of applications.

Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Precision Horticulture

A prototype wireless sensor network for measuring soil and environmental characteristics was developed and evaluated for purposes of scheduling irrigation on field vegetable farms. The system consists of a central base station connected to multiple sensor nodes installed in the field and distributed over several crops. The sensor nodes consist of specially designed hardware which transmits data to a base station inside the farm offices. The relatively low cost of the system (USD 6000 for a 20-sensor node system) allows for installation of a dense sensor population that can adequately represent inherent soil characteristics such us temperature, volumetric moisture content, salinity and so on. Additional sensors can be used to measure environmental variables and the quality of the water used to irrigate the crops. This paper describes our experience during the design and implementation of the wireless sensor network and its components in a field crop of Broccoli (Brassica oleracea L. var Marathon) in the semiarid region of Campo de Cartagena in Southern Spain. It presents the topology of the network, which was deployed using three types of sensor nodes (Soil-Mote, Environmental-Mote and Water-Mote).

TRIoT: A Proposal for Deploying Teleo-Reactive Nodes for IoT Systems

In this paper we present a multi-agent architecture for IoT systems based on the Teleo-Reactive paradigm. Our final goal is to prove that the Teleo-Reactive (TR) paradigm is suitable for IoT systems, allowing them the ability of being responsive to changes in the state of the environment while being directed to achieve their final tasks and conferring the network the robustness and reliability that IoT systems demand. A hierarchical architecture in which Coordination Nodes, Local Coordination Nodes and Local Nodes running Erlang and TR code, communicating among themselves and asking for services to the Cloud is described and the hardware, software and communications protocols used are specified. For validating this approach, a case-study for precision farming is being developed. A GUI will allow non-technical users to simply specify the TR rules of their IoT systems, fueling the development of IoT.

Towards a unified platform for agent-based cloud robotics

This paper describes a platform that aims to design, build, and validate a new generation of cloud robotic platforms that enable agent-based intelligent control of robots deployed in unknown and dynamic environments. The platform will consider: (1) novel techniques for programming reactive plans and robotic behaviours through missions and novel mechanisms for building new behaviours from existing ones, both for experienced and non-expert users; (2) novel multi-layered cloud platform as the infrastructure to maintain a continuous link between the robots acting on a physical environment and their agent counterparts, to provide sensor data from robots to agents, and to provide high-level autonomous decisions from agents to robots.