DustCart, a Mobile Robot for Urban Environments: Experiments of Pollution Monitoring and Mapping during Autonomous Navigation in Urban Scenarios

In the framework of DustBot European project, aimed at developing a new multi-robot system for urban hygiene management, we have developed a twowheeled robot: DustCart. DustCart aims at providing a solution to door-to-door garbage collection: the robot, called by a user, navigates autonomously to his/her house; collects the garbage from the user and discharges it in an apposite area. An additional feature of DustCart is the capability to monitor the air pollution by means of an on board Air Monitoring Module (AMM). The AMM integrates sensors to monitor several atmospheric pollutants, such as carbon monoxide (CO), particular matter (PM10), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3) plus temperature (T) and relative humidity (rHu). An Ambient Intelligence platform (AmI) manages the robots’ operations through a wireless connection. AmI is able to collect measurements taken by different robots and to process them to create a pollution distribution map. In this paper we describe the DustCart robot system, focusing on the AMM and on the process of creating the pollutant distribution maps. We report results of experiments of one DustCart robot moving in urban scenarios and producing gas distribution maps using the Kernel DM+V algorithm. These experiments can be considered as one of the first attempts to use robots as mobile monitoring devices that can complement the traditional fixed stations. Index Terms – mobile robots, urban robots, gas mapping, navigation.