Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots

J. Monroy, J. Gonzalez-Jimenez, "Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots", Electronic Nose Technologies and Advances in Machine Olfaction, IGI Global, pp. 244--263, 2018, doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-3862-2.ch012 Versión preprint, con permiso del editorOut of all the components of a mobile robot, its sensorial system is undoubtedly among the most critical ones when operating in real environments. Until now, these sensorial systems mostly relied on range sensors (laser scanner, sonar, active triangulation) and cameras. While electronic noses have barely been employed, they can provide a complementary sensory information, vital for some applications, as with humans. This chapter analyzes the motivation of providing a robot with gas-sensing capabilities and also reviews some of the hurdles that are preventing smell from achieving the importance of other sensing modalities in robotics. The achievements made so far are reviewed to illustrate the current status on the three main fields within robotics olfaction: the classification of volatile substances, the spatial estimation of the gas dispersion from sparse measurements, and the localization of the gas source within a known environment

Cooking practices, air quality, and the acceptability of advanced cookstoves in Haryana, India: an exploratory study to inform large-scale interventions.

BackgroundIn India, approximately 66% of households rely on dung or woody biomass as fuels for cooking. These fuels are burned under inefficient conditions, leading to household air pollution (HAP) and exposure to smoke containing toxic substances. Large-scale intervention efforts need to be informed by careful piloting to address multiple methodological and sociocultural issues. This exploratory study provides preliminary data for such an exercise from Palwal District, Haryana, India.MethodsTraditional cooking practices were assessed through semi-structured interviews in participating households. Philips and Oorja, two brands of commercially available advanced cookstoves with small blowers to improve combustion, were deployed in these households. Concentrations of particulate matter (PM) with a diameter <2.5 μm (PM2.5) and carbon monoxide (CO) related to traditional stove use were measured using real-time and integrated personal, microenvironmental samplers for optimizing protocols to evaluate exposure reduction. Qualitative data on acceptability of advanced stoves and objective measures of stove usage were also collected.ResultsTwenty-eight of the thirty-two participating households had outdoor primary cooking spaces. Twenty households had liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) but preferred traditional stoves as the cost of LPG was higher and because meals cooked on traditional stoves were perceived to taste better. Kitchen area concentrations and kitchen personal concentrations assessed during cooking events were very high, with respective mean PM2.5 concentrations of 468 and 718 µg/m3. Twenty-four hour outdoor concentrations averaged 400 µg/m3. Twenty-four hour personal CO concentrations ranged between 0.82 and 5.27 ppm. The Philips stove was used more often and for more hours than the Oorja.ConclusionsThe high PM and CO concentrations reinforce the need for interventions that reduce HAP exposure in the aforementioned community. Of the two stoves tested, participants expressed satisfaction with the Philips brand as it met the local criteria for usability. Further understanding of how the introduction of an advanced stove influences patterns of household energy use is needed. The preliminary data provided here would be useful for designing feasibility and/or pilot studies aimed at intervention efforts locally and nationally

Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement

In this study, the leaves, roots, soil, and associated microorganisms of plants have been evaluated as a possible means of reducing indoor air pollutants. Additionally, a novel approach of using plant systems for removing high concentrations of indoor air pollutants such as cigarette smoke, organic solvents, and possibly radon has been designed from this work. This air filter design combines plants with an activated carbon filter. The rationale for this design, which evolved from wastewater treatment studies, is based on moving large volumes of contaminated air through an activated carbon bed where smoke, organic chemicals, pathogenic microorganisms (if present), and possibly radon are absorbed by the carbon filter. Plant roots and their associated microorganisms then destroy the pathogenic viruses, bacteria, and the organic chemicals, eventually converting all of these air pollutants into new plant tissue. It is believed that the decayed radon products would be taken up the plant roots and retained in the plant tissue

Hybrid Ventilation System and Soft-Sensors for Maintaining Indoor Air Quality and Thermal Comfort in Buildings

Maintaining both indoor air quality (IAQ) and thermal comfort in buildings along with optimized energy consumption is a challenging problem. This investigation presents a novel design for hybrid ventilation system enabled by predictive control and soft-sensors to achieve both IAQ and thermal comfort by combining predictive control with demand controlled ventilation (DCV). First, we show that the problem of maintaining IAQ, thermal comfort and optimal energy is a multi-objective optimization problem with competing objectives, and a predictive control approach is required to smartly control the system. This leads to many implementation challenges which are addressed by designing a hybrid ventilation scheme supported by predictive control and soft-sensors. The main idea of the hybrid ventilation system is to achieve thermal comfort by varying the ON/OFF times of the air conditioners to maintain the temperature within user-defined bands using a predictive control and IAQ is maintained using Healthbox 3.0, a DCV device. Furthermore, this study also designs soft-sensors by combining the Internet of Things (IoT)-based sensors with deep-learning tools. The hardware realization of the control and IoT prototype is also discussed. The proposed novel hybrid ventilation system and the soft-sensors are demonstrated in a real research laboratory, i.e., Center for Research in Automatic Control Engineering (C-RACE) located at Kalasalingam University, India. Our results show the perceived benefits of hybrid ventilation, predictive control, and soft-sensors

A serious game for raising air pollution awareness in children

Air pollution has been one of the most discussed topics in the world in the last years, due to its effects on the atmosphere of our planet and our health overall. Currently, over 2.6 billion people are exposed to indoor air pollution, which tells us that efforts are needed to raise people’s awareness about air pollution. The use of serious games and gamification of apps have raised people’s perception, but these effects end up being short-term. This work presents “Problemas no Ar”, a game developed in Unity about air pollution where the player’s goal is to control a character tasked to monitor indoor and outdoor air pollution with sensors in several city zones. While playing, children are expected to learn the possible causes of pollution in each zone and, this way, the game attempts to promote pro-environmental behaviours. This game allows educators to configure the problems that the player has to solve. Pre- and post-surveys about air pollution were elaborated to evaluate perception of twenty students of an elementary school before and after playing the game. Participants’ gameplay experience was also evaluated through a usability score. Results show that the game provided some significant positive effects on participants’ perception. In terms of usability scores, the mean value was 75 out of 100, a value that is acceptable.A poluição atmosférica tem sido um dos temas mais discutidos no mundo nos últimos anos, o que está a afetar a atmosfera do nosso planeta e a nossa saúde em geral. Mais de 2.6 mil milhões de pessoas no mundo sofrem de poluição do ar interior dentro das suas casas, isto diz-nos que são necessários esforços para aumentar a consciência das pessoas sobre a poluição do ar. A utilização de jogos sérios e a gamificação de aplicações têm aumentado a perceção das pessoas, mas estes efeitos acabam por ser de curto prazo. Este trabalho apresenta "Problemas no Ar", um jogo desenvolvido em Unity sobre poluição atmosférica onde o objetivo do jogador é monitorizar a poluição atmosférica interior e exterior com sensores dispostos por várias zonas urbanas e aprender as possíveis causas da poluição em cada zona, tentando promover comportamentos pró-ambientais nas crianças. Este jogo permite que educadores consigam configurar os problemas que o jogador tem de resolver. Questionários pré- e pós- jogo sobre a poluição do ar foram elaborados para avaliar a perceção de vinte alunos do ensino básico antes e depois de jogar o jogo, a pontuação de usabilidade do jogo também foi medida. Os resultados mostram que o jogo teve efeitos positivos na perceção dos participantes, alguns itens foram significativos, outros não tão significativos. Em termos de usabilidade do jogo, o valor médio foi de 75 de 100, o que é aceitável

The effect of short-term changes in air pollution on respiratory and cardiovascular morbidity in Nicosia, Cyprus.

Presented at the 6th International Conference on Urban Air Quality, Limassol, March, 2007. Short-paper was submitted for peer-review and appears in proceedings of the conference.This study investigates the effect of daily changes in levels of PM10 on the daily volume of respiratory and cardiovascular admissions in Nicosia, Cyprus during 1995-2004. After controlling for long- (year and month) and short-term (day of the week) patterns as well as the effect of weather in Generalized Additive Poisson models, some positive associations were observed with all-cause and cause-specific admissions. Risk of hospitalization increased stepwise across quartiles of days with increasing levels of PM10 by 1.3% (-0.3, 2.8), 4.9% (3.3, 6.6), 5.6% (3.9, 7.3) as compared to days with the lowest concentrations. For every 10μg/m3 increase in daily average PM10 concentration, there was a 1.2% (-0.1%, 2.4%) increase in cardiovascular admissions. With respects to respiratory admissions, an effect was observed only in the warm season with a 1.8% (-0.22, 3.85) increase in admissions per 10μg/m3 increase in PM10. The effect on respiratory admissions seemed to be much stronger in women and, surprisingly, restricted to people of adult age

Proactive Indoor Air Quality Monitoring System

In recent times indoor air quality has attracted the attention of policy makers and researchers similar to that of external air pollution. The indoor environments are confined and closed compared to external environments providing less opportunity for the pollutants to dilute. Our everyday devices emit various solids and gases into the environment during their operation. These emissions contain many substances that are harmful to human health, when exposed to them for a prolonged period of time. Here we propose an air quality monitoring system that allows us to monitor and check live air quality in particular areas through IOT. The System uses air sensors to sense presence of harmful gases/compounds in the air and constantly transmit this data to microcontroller PIC16F877A. The sensors interact with microcontroller which processes this data and transmits it over internet. The gas levels can be viewed through a webpage from anywhere in the world. This allows authorities to monitor air pollution in different areas and take action against it

Characterising the Exposure of Prison Staff to Second-Hand Tobacco Smoke

Acknowledgements This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research Public Health Research Programme (project number 15/55/44). We are grateful to all the staff at the Scottish Prison Service and in HMP Kilmarnock and HMP Addiewell who assisted with this study. We are also extremely grateful to David Walker, Ruaraidh Dobson and Mrs Flora Buthlay for their help with data collection and retrieval of instruments from prisons, and to Dr Steve Turner for helpful comments on an earlier draft. KH, HS, GL, ED gratefully acknowledge core funding from UK MRC and Chief Scientist Office (MC_UU_12017/12; SPHSU12; MC/PC/13027 partnership grant) for their work within prison settings. We acknowledge the contribution of our co-investigators in the TIPs research team to the overall design of the TIPs study (Professor Linda Bauld, Dr Kathleen Boyd, Dr Philip Conaglen, Dr Peter Craig, Douglas Eadie, Professor Alastair Leyland, Professor Jill Pell).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Integrated human exposure to air pollution

The book “Integrated human exposure to air pollution” aimed to increase knowledge about human exposure in different micro-environments, or when citizens are performing specific tasks, to demonstrate methodologies for the understanding of pollution sources and their impact on indoor and ambient air quality, and, ultimately, to identify the most effective mitigation measures to decrease human exposure and protect public health. Taking advantage of the latest available tools, such as internet of things (IoT), low-cost sensors and a wide access to online platforms and apps by the citizens, new methodologies and approaches can be implemented to understand which factors can influence human exposure to air pollution. This knowledge, when made available to the citizens, along with the awareness of the impact of air pollution on human life and earth systems, can empower them to act, individually or collectively, to promote behavioral changes aiming to reduce pollutants’ emissions. Overall, this book gathers fourteen innovative studies that provide new insights regarding these important topics within the scope of human exposure to air pollution. A total of five main areas were discussed and explored within this book and, hopefully, can contribute to the advance of knowledge in this field