Robot-based mobile sensing system for high-resolution indoor temperature monitoring

Abstract

Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) monitoring is an important basis of smart buildings to ensure human comfort and control energy systems. IEQ monitoring conventionally relies on a limited number of stationary sensors deployed at selected locations, which has little capacity to capture fine spatial characteristics due to the cost of infrastructure and maintenance. This paper describes a robot-based mobile sensing system for high-resolution temperature monitoring by selecting air temperature as the targeted IEQ parameter. Experiments were conducted in a classroom to test the mobile sensing performance through comparisons with the dense stationary sensor network. Furthermore, two spatio-temporal processing methods were developed to reconstruct continuous thermal maps from short- and long-term monitoring. The results indicate that the robot velocity of 0.25–0.45 m/s is better than 0.60–0.80 m/s and 0.10–0.20 m/s, and that the proposed methods are suitable for generating accurate, high-resolution thermal maps.