Indoor Air Quality Monitoring using flying Nanobots: Design and Experimental Study

• Published in: 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Olfaction and Electronic Nose (ISOEN) pp. 1 - 3
• Main Authors: Neumann, Patrick P., Hirschberger, Paul, Baurzhan, Zhandos, Tiebe, Carlo, Hofmann, Michael, Hullmann, Dino, Bartholmai, Matthias
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2019
• Subjects: Calibration; gas detector; Gas detectors; Indoor air quality; Monitoring; Nano aerial robot; Robot sensing systems; swarm; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISBN: 9781538683286; 9781538683279; 153868327X; 1538683288
• DOI: 10.1109/ISOEN.2019.8823496

In this paper, we introduce a nano aerial robot swarm for Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) monitoring applications such as occupational health and safety of (industrial) workplaces. The robotic swarm is composed of nano Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), based on the Crazyflie 2.0 quadrocopter, and small lightweight Metal Oxide (MOX) gas sensors for measuring the Total Volatile Organic Compound (TVOC), which is a measure for IAQ. An indoor localization and positioning system is used to estimate the absolute 3D position of the swarm similar to GPS. A test scenario was built up to validate and optimize the swarm for the intended applications. Besides calibration of the IAQ sensors, we performed experiments to investigate the influence of the rotor downwash on the gas measurements at different altitudes and compared them with stationary measurements. Moreover, we did a first evaluation of the gas distribution mapping performance. Based on this novel IAQ monitoring concept, new algorithms in the field of Mobile Robot Olfaction (MRO) are planned to be developed exploiting the abilities of an aerial robotic swarm.