With a Year 2 grant from EPICS in IEEE, students partner with farmers to advance IoT and AI to protect snake fruit cultivation.
Farmers in the Mitra Turindo Snake Fruit Community in Sleman, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, face persistent challenges from fruit fly infestations. Climate change has intensified the problem, as pests adapt quickly to shifting conditions in temperature, humidity, rainfall, and light intensity. Traditional seasonal predictions are no longer reliable, leading to frequent crop losses. This underscores the urgent need for adaptive pest forecasting and management.
In 2024, nine students from the IEEE Indonesia Section at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, together with two IEEE Volunteers, launched their EPICS in IEEE project, “An AIoT-powered Smart Agricultural System for Pests Forecasting and Management.” By combining real-time environmental monitoring with AI-driven forecasting, the project equips farmers and local governments with timely insights to act quickly and protect crops more sustainably.
Their solution, the MySalak app, integrates Internet of Things (IoT) hardware and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to collect real-time environmental data for pest monitoring and analysis. “The hardware uses IoT nodes that read environmental sensors such as temperature, humidity, rainfall, and light intensity. The data is transmitted over long distances using LoRa (Long Range) communication,” explains Albert Tirto Kusumo, the team’s lead AI developer. “On the software side, the team developed a Progressive Web Application (PWA) that provides farmers with a real-time dashboard, interactive maps, an FTD (Flies per Trap per Day) tracker, photo upload for fruit fly monitoring, and educational articles.”
Learn more about the development of the project in Year 1 here.
At the end of Year 1, farmers and government officers reported that “the system helped reduce uncertainty, improve coordination, and promote more sustainable farming practices,” Kusumo recalls. A follow-up survey revealed that 95% of farmers desired additional IoT nodes to expand coverage, as well as refined prediction tools, new features, and access to outreach programs. Encouraged by this “high trust and perceived value,” as Kusumo describes, the team secured a Year 2 EPICS in IEEE grant to scale the system with advanced sensors, expanded data collection, improved prediction accuracy, and strengthened analytics.
Building on Success in Year 2
In Year 2, the team plans to deploy an additional twelve nodes to extend monitoring to nine more farmer sub-communities within the Mitra Turindo snake fruit plantation. One of the biggest improvements from Year 1 to Year 2 will be in the Node design. Kusumo explains, “The redesign from Node V1 to Node V2 showed how much difference a well-thought-out hardware approach can make. By improving the way the system handles its power, the new version removes unnecessary energy drain and can run for years instead of just weeks on the same battery.”
Alongside this expansion, the team will enhance the MySalak app with new features, including device status monitoring, an AI chatbot, and a redesigned interface. AI model enhancements include expanding the dataset for drone mapping and developing a multivariate prediction model to forecast pest outbreaks more accurately. The team will also conduct two farmer mentoring sessions with about 90 participants and implement regular technical checks to evaluate node performance and app activity.
Developing a system like this does not come without its challenges. “On the AI side, we faced accuracy limitations in fruit fly object detection due to small object size and dataset imbalance,” Kusumo shares. “We also faced several real-world engineering challenges, especially on the hardware side, such as power leakage and water ingress that forced us to redesign the enclosure.”
The team’s partnership with the Mitra Turindo Snake Fruit Farmer Community (Paguyuban Mitra Turindo) proved invaluable. This collaboration provided authentic farmer perspectives, highlighting the importance of engaging directly with the individuals whom the engineering solutions are designed to impact. Kusumo notes, “[The] farmers treated us not just as students, but as partners. They were very open in sharing their challenges, patient with testing new technologies, and highly respectful during discussions, even sharing a valuable lesson on how to nurture a plantation.”
The Year 2 project is expected to benefit 250 active farmers across 12 sub-communities in Mitra Turindo, located in the Sleman region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Beyond the Farm: Technical Scaling and Community-Based Learning
Looking ahead, the team will continue to expand and strengthen the system. Kusumo shares that their long-term goal is to ensure the platform becomes “reliable enough to be used as a regional decision-support platform for pest management.”
The project has enhanced the team’s engineering skills, providing “a clearer understanding of what makes a device efficient and reliable” and “reinforcing the importance of smart design decisions, careful planning, and attention to detail,” Kusumo reflects.
He emphasizes how this experience differs from traditional coursework, noting that the project is “significantly more practical and interdisciplinary than typical engineering classes. While standard courses often focus on theoretical understanding and isolated assignments, this project requires real-world problem solving, long-term system design, team collaboration, and direct consideration of user and environmental constraints.”
“EPICS in IEEE projects give students real exposure to community-based engineering, interdisciplinary teamwork, and problem-solving that goes far beyond traditional coursework,” Kusumo states. “It is one of the most valuable learning experiences for engineering students.”
“With the support of EPICS in IEEE Year 2 funding, we are able to build upon the Year 1 deployment by working alongside the community to refine and scale the solutions. This support enables deeper field implementation, strengthens community engagement, and ensures that the technology is impactful and sustainable.” Nabila Husna Shabrina, project leader.
EPICS in IEEE is excited to continue supporting this impactful project into its second year, where students continue to gather community feedback and make improvements to their initial design. This innovative Year 2 project was made possible by $9,258 in funding from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S), an EPICS in IEEE partner. Thank you for your incredible support, which has allowed EPICS in IEEE students to make a meaningful difference in Indonesia.
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