Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) has become public concern recently. Air ducting is used in
Mechanical Ventilation and Air Conditioning (MVAC) system to deliver air to the
building occupants. Without proper maintenance of the ducting system, it will affect
the IAQ of overall building. Monitoring air ducting is the preliminary step to get real
view inside the ducting. This study focused on the development of the Mechanical
Ducting Robot (MerDuct) to monitor the ducting and data collection at real time (in�situ). The developments of the MerDuct have been performed in three phases.
MerDuct were controlled wirelessly, and equipped with lamp and camera to get real
visual inside the ducting. Case studies were visually performed suing MerDuct in
three different scenarios namely full operation ducting, second is seldom operation
ducting and third is abandoned ducting. Three case studies had been conducted in
Block A4 Academic Office Building UTHM, Local Exhaust Ventilation (LEV) at
Thermal Environmental Laboratory UTHM, and Building Services Laboratory Block
E6, Faculty of Engineering Technology UTHM respectively. MerDuct was designed
to be able travel to the various ranges along the ducting and using analog joystick to
make it user friendly .The seldom operation of ducting was clearly shows clean
ducting without any trapped dust and web since the LEV was only used once a week
and it is only less than 1 year old. The other two scenarios clearly showed trapped
dust and web from photo captured by MerDuct. From the experimental data,
MerDuct was successfully performed as monitoring robot to detect Indoor Air
Quality (IAQ) problem source. The image taken by MerDuct could help building
owner to predict necessary time to perform the duct cleaning to improve the IAQ
based on occupational safety and health for sustainable development
