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Estimating soil moisture using RF signals

Published: 14 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose CoMEt, a radio frequency based approach that measures soil moisture at multiple depths underneath the ground surface without installing any objects in the soil and without making any contact with the ground surface. The main insight behind CoMEt is that the phase of an RF signal depends on its wavelength in the medium through which it is propagating, which in turn depends on the amount of soil moisture. To measure soil moisture, CoMEt leverages the phase changes across successive antennas in a receive antenna array along with the time of flight of the received signal to jointly estimate the depth of each layer of soil and the wavelength of the signal in each layer. It then uses these estimates to obtain the amount of moisture in each soil layer. We have implemented CoMEt using a software defined radio and a Raspberry Pi to measure soil moisture in real-time. We have extensively evaluated CoMEt in both indoor and outdoor environments. Our results show that CoMEt estimated soil moisture for up to three layers of soil with a median error of just 1.1%.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MobiCom '22: Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing And Networking
October 2022
932 pages
ISBN:9781450391818
DOI:10.1145/3495243
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 14 October 2022

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Cited By

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  • (2024)GrainSense: A Wireless Grain Moisture Sensing System Based on Wi-Fi SignalsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36785898:3(1-25)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
  • (2024)MetaSoil: Passive mmWave Metamaterial Multi-layer Soil Moisture SensingProceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3666025.3699334(225-238)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
  • (2024)SoilCares: Towards Low-cost Soil Macronutrients and Moisture Monitoring Using RF-VNIR SensingProceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3643832.3661868(196-209)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Cost-Effective Soil Carbon Sensing with Wi-Fi and Optical SignalsProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690675(1015-1029)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Wi-PainterProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36338097:4(1-25)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
  • (2024)SoilTAG: Fine-Grained Soil Moisture Sensing Through Chipless TagsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.325313523:3(2153-2170)Online publication date: Mar-2024
  • (2024)FruitSight: A Millimeter Wave Radar Based Approach to Detect Occluded Fruits2024 IEEE 21st International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS)10.1109/MASS62177.2024.00044(270-278)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Noncontact Soil Moisture Estimation Using Continuous Wave Radar and Deep LearningIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2024.343053124:17(28419-28426)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
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