Performance Evaluation of Soil Substance Measurement System in Garlic Plant based on Internet of Things with Mesh Topology Network Scenario

The high consumption followed by low production makes the government have to import garlic to meet domestic needs every year. To help increase garlic yields, a system designed to facilitate the process of measuring Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K) content on plantation land in realtime using NPK sensor and nodemcu as microcontrollers and peovide the connectivity of realtime information using mesh topology. This system is an Internet of Things (IoT) based network, where internet connectivity is used to exchange information with each other with the objects around it. The result of the design of this system is a device to measure each element of N, P, and K as well as fertility status based on NPK values that have been obtained. And, with the IoT feature and mesh topology built in this device, the measurement data and whether or not the device works can be monitored easily through an android application that has been made on a smartphone. The mesh topology that built in this device is using painlessmesh library where the network built on the system is a true ad-hoc network, meaning that no-planning, central controller, or router is required.  Any system of 1 or more nodes will self-organize into fully functional mesh. We conclude that the accuracy of the measurement data compared to the NPK meter analog (Doctor Plant) is above 90%. Based on the durability test of the device and the system using Xiaomi's power bank of 5000mAh, the device and the system work well for 30 hours without any problems. Moreover, the accuracy of the data measured and uploaded to the database is no error with a 100% compatibility rate.

Food Environment, Built Environment, and Women\u27s BMI: Evidence from Erie County, New York

The authors present the results of a neighborhood-scaled exploratory study that tests the association of the food environment and the built environment with women’s body mass index (BMI) in Erie County, New York. The proximity of women’s homes to a supermarket relative to a convenience store is associated with lower BMI. A diverse land use mix in a neighborhood is positively associated with women’s BMI, especially when restaurants dominate nonresidential land use. The article offers suggestions for how food environments may be improved using planning strategies

Non-Technical Individual Skills are Weakly Connected to the Maturity of Agile Practices

Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agile software development. Objective: In this paper, we investigate whether non-technical individual skills can predict the use of agile practices. Method: Through creating a set of multiple linear regression models using a total of 113 participants from agile teams in six software development organizations from The Netherlands and Brazil, we analyzed the predictive power of non-technical individual skills in relation to agile practices. Results: The results show that there is surprisingly low power in using non-technical individual skills to predict (i.e. explain variance in) the mature use of agile practices in software development. Conclusions: Therefore, we conclude that looking at non-technical individual skills is not the optimal level of analysis when trying to understand, and explain, the mature use of agile practices in the software development context. We argue that it is more important to focus on the non-technical skills as a team-level capacity instead of assuring that all individuals possess such skills when understanding the use of the agile practices.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

Human experience in the natural and built environment : implications for research policy and practice

22nd IAPS conference. Edited book of abstracts. 427 pp. University of Strathclyde, Sheffield and West of Scotland Publication. ISBN: 978-0-94-764988-3

A Three-Step Methodology to Improve Domestic Energy Efficiency

Increasing energy prices and the greenhouse effect lead to more awareness of energy efficiency of electricity supply. During the last years, a lot of technologies have been developed to improve this efficiency. Next to large scale technologies such as windturbine parks, domestic technologies are developed. These domestic technologies can be divided in 1) Distributed Generation (DG), 2) Energy Storage and 3) Demand Side Load Management. Control algorithms optimizing a combination of these techniques can raise the energy reduction potential of the individual techniques. In this paper an overview of current research is given and a general concept is deducted. Based on this concept, a three-step optimization methodology is proposed using 1) offline local prediction, 2) offline global planning and 3) online local scheduling. The paper ends with results of simulations and field tests showing that the methodology is promising.\u

Agile Autonomous Driving using End-to-End Deep Imitation Learning

We present an end-to-end imitation learning system for agile, off-road autonomous driving using only low-cost sensors. By imitating a model predictive controller equipped with advanced sensors, we train a deep neural network control policy to map raw, high-dimensional observations to continuous steering and throttle commands. Compared with recent approaches to similar tasks, our method requires neither state estimation nor on-the-fly planning to navigate the vehicle. Our approach relies on, and experimentally validates, recent imitation learning theory. Empirically, we show that policies trained with online imitation learning overcome well-known challenges related to covariate shift and generalize better than policies trained with batch imitation learning. Built on these insights, our autonomous driving system demonstrates successful high-speed off-road driving, matching the state-of-the-art performance.Comment: 13 pages, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 201