Cooperative 3D Air Quality Assessment with Wireless Chemical Sensing Networks

Abstract

Indoor Air Quality assessment is an emerging application field for chemical sensing due to raising concerns about indoor VOC pollution levels. Local and distributed assessment of chemicals concentrations is also significant for safety (gas spills detection, pollution monitoring) and security applications as well as for HVAC automation for energy efficiency. Mobile robot based and wireless sensor network based approaches are under investigation for providing efficient solutions. Here, we report results obtained by a network of wireless intelligent electronic noses in a semi-controlled environment for the detection of pollutants in complex mixtures. The w-noses are equipped with local discrimination and quantification capabilities sustained by trained artificial neural networks overcoming interferents issues. 3D chemicals concentration reconstruction is obtained by a sensor fusion algorithm at datasink on the basis of the w-noses responses.