Active sensing to characterize the heterogeneity of plant stress

While most phenotyping platforms rely primarily on image-based measurements, advanced plant characterization requires the integration of active physiological sensing modali- ties such as chlorophyll fluorescence. We present an autonomous robotic platform designed to perform targeted fluorescence measurements on plant leaves. The system combines 3D plant reconstruction, geometric analysis, and motion planning to localize suitable measurement points and generate collision-free trajectories for a robotic manipulator. A dense 3D model of the plant is reconstructed from multi-view data and used to extract candidate leaf surfaces based on orientation, accessibility, and sensing constraints. These targets are then integrated into a task-level planning framework that guides the end-effector to precise contact or near-contact configurations required for point-based fluorescence acquisition. The platform enables automated, repeatable, and spatially resolved physiological measurements that go beyond passive imaging. By tightly coupling perception, geometric reasoning, and manipulation, the proposed system provides a robotics-driven approach to high-resolution plant phenotyping and opens new directions for autonomous agricultural inspection and plant-aware manipulation.

Active Sensing for RIS-Aided Tracking and Power Control: A Hybrid Neuroevolution and Supervised Learning Approach

This paper studies energy efficient tracking of power-limited mobile users with the assistance of a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS). Since localization pilot transmissions dominate the energy budget of power-constrained devices, we introduce a low-overhead feedback link from the Base Station (BS) to the user to enable dynamic uplink power control. To navigate the discrete and decentralized nature of this active sensing problem, we propose a novel Dual-Agent (DA) deep learning framework that jointly optimizes the discrete RIS phase profiles and the UE's transmit power in real time. Specifically, our approach employs a hybrid training methodology integrating the neuroevolution paradigm with supervised learning, effectively overcoming the non-differentiability of discrete phase responses from the RIS unit elements and the strict information bottleneck of single-bit feedback messages for pilot power control. The proposed DA active sensing framework can be applied with both single- and multi-antenna BSs, the latter with only minor modifications in the structure of one NN: an additional output branch with appropriate structure is included for the latter case to select a valid digital combiner from a finite set. Extensive numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves highly accurate and robust tracking across diverse target motion models, outperforming extended Kalman and particle filters, as well as, machine learning-based trackers. Furthermore, in static localization, it is shown to significantly outperform traditional fingerprinting schemes, deep reinforcement learning baselines, and standard backpropagation-based estimators.

Active Sensing and Deferred-Decision Trajectory Optimization for Robust Target Identification

We study trajectory optimization in mobile sensing systems that must identify which member of a finite candidate set is the true target, while maintaining reachability to all potential candidate targets, under resource constraints. Deferred-Decision Trajectory Optimization (DDTO) addresses this setting by computing trajectories that reach individual targets but remain coincident for as long as possible before separating toward different targets. We propose Active-Sensing DDTO (AS-DDTO), which extends DDTO by adding a trajectory-dependent information-acquisition term to the planning objective. The resulting planner maintains reachability to candidate targets while biasing the coincident portion of the trajectories toward regions that enable earlier target identification. The framework supports Bayesian updates and conformal candidate-set updates for distance-dependent sensing. We derive a mixed-integer conic reformulation and provide guarantees on recursive feasibility, belief concentration, and fixed-time coverage for the raw conformal candidate set. Numerical simulations show improved target identification compared with standard DDTO under distance-dependent sensing uncertainty and limited sensing budget.