Building an Automatic Mobile Sensing Platform for Indoor Environmental Quality using Turtlebot3

Americans spend 90% of their life indoors, therefore providing ideal indoor environmental quality (IEQ) that supports human health and productivity is essential. To address IEQ-related problems, the first step is to measure, monitor, and evaluate current IEQ situations.
Our team in School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University has developed an automatic mobile sensing platform using Turtlebot3 that will help provide IEQ assessments simultaneously, continuously, and remotely.

The platform includes an infrared thermal camera, an RGB-D camera, temperature and relative humidity sensors, acoustic sensors, particulate matter sensors, and CO2 sensors. Based on the measurements of both IEQ and building envelope, the inspectors can identify the IEQ-related problems caused by the deterioration of the building envelope, dis-functioning HVAC equipment, and occupants-eccentric issues.

The diagram of the mobile sensing platform is as follows:

Here is also a picture showing the automatic sensing platform working in the field for IEQ assessments:

The next step is to add OpenManipulator to the mobile sensing platform. OpenManipulator can hold the camera suite consisting of the infrared sensor and depth sensor, which allows a more flexible and agile measurement process.

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