New robot developed to measure Indoor Environmental Quality
By Stefano Schiavon
20 December 2017

Real-time monitoring of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) creates opportunities to assess occupants’ comfort, health, and well-being, but a challenge to creating highly-granular IEQ monitoring is the cost of installing and maintaining arrays of sensors throughout a building.

To address this issue, Associate Professor of Architecture Stefano Schiavon and a team of designers and engineers from SinBerBest designed, built, and tested an autonomous robot named the IEQ Bot, demonstrated in a video above. This robot can navigate and map interior building spaces and measure and analyze IEQ with a wireless sensing platform, sensing levels of CO₂, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), illuminance, particles, and temperature.

Such a robot could be used to monitor and map a wide range of IEQ metrics including thermal comfort, lighting, air quality, and acoustics. Another application could be the identification of indoor pollution sources. It may also provide a unique method for building commissioning and post-occupancy evaluation.

This collaborative work involves researchers Ming Jin, Yulun Tian, Mingjian Lu, and Costas Spanos from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Shichao Liu and Schiavon from the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley and was supported by the SinBerBEST project.

Read more about Schiavon's latest project here.