Smart system for distributed sensing

This paper describes ongoing work for implementing a distributed multi-robot system for measuring various physical properties of the environment in a coordinated manner. Modeling spatial distributions of physical quantities such as temperature, illumination, humidity, gas concentrations, or magnetic flux provides an opportunity to observe how these distributions change in time, how to utilise the information captured by the distributions, and to determine how to adjust the distributions by modifying the environment. The information provided by the models could be useful in numerous applications such as in dynamic optimisation of the heating system of a building for saving energy, in monitoring the air quality in various parts of hospitals and in monitoring the water quality of lakes and rivers (e.g. pH and oxygen levels). Some of the modeled distributions or maps may also carry information which can be used in mobile computing. This article describes the physical robots, which act as mobile measurement instruments in addition to approaches used to model spatial distributions by utilising Gaussian processes, and to coordinate the multi-robot system during the modeling. Preliminary experiments are also presented demonstrating optimal spatial sampling, optimization of measurement paths of multiple robots, mobile robot self-localisation based on the ambient magnetic field of the environment and multi-robot coordination.