Development, Design and Construction of a Mobile Environmental Monitoring System for Acquiring Climate Data

This paper presents the development of a mobile environmental monitoring system capable of measuring and logging the temperature in a given region. These systems can find applications in the field of agriculture where climate is of great importance for the cultivation of crops. They can also be used in quantifying global warming in a particular region over a period of time, and to monitor human-induced climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from industry, transport, agriculture and other vital economic sectors. The mobile environmental monitoring system was built using an autonomous mobile robot, a temperature sensor and a buzzer. When the system is powered on, it moves forward for a few seconds then stops and measured the temperature at that particular location. Intelligent navigation decisions are made based on the acquired temperature data. Temperature data obtained by the system can be viewed with a host PC. These data can also be stored for future reference. The system also demonstrated the ability to give off an alarm if the measured temperature was outside a predefined range. Future improvements to the system include the integration of wireless capability to enable wireless transmission and storage of acquired environmental data, and the addition of other sensors, such as humidity and gas sensors, to obtain more robust data from the environment.

Development, Design and Construction of a Mobile Environmental Monitoring System for Acquiring Climate Data Keywords:

robotics , mobile robot , remote environment monitoring