Indoor Environmental Mapping by Means of Autonomous Guided Agents

The indoor environmental monitoring of industrial production sites is becoming increasingly important in an attempt to comply with current regulations inhering working conditions and production standards. Although monitoring tasks often consist of repetitive, time-consuming, and sometimes dangerous actions, they are mostly carried out by a human operator, who is responsible for carrying the sensor set around the working area and for enabling the communication with a remote processing system. The aim of the paper is to present the architecture of an integrated autonomous system for three-dimensional mapping of environmental conditions in indoor spaces. The proposed system integrates one (or more) autonomous guided vehicles, carrying the sensor set around the working area, a distributed wireless sensor network, providing a real-time tracking of the mobile agent, and a remote processing unit to store and elaborate the measured data. A prototype implementation of the system is herein described, in order to demonstrate the overall system feasibility.