Service robotics for data centers monitoring

This work a novel solutions that relies on autonomous robots with the aim of improving data centers power efficiency by providing an easy to use tool to perform environmental monitoring. Data center environmental monitoring has been highly explored in the last few years. In fact, due to the high power density managed by these buildings, precise monitoring is necessary to improve power efficiency without increasing the risk of hardware failure. This work proposes a robot system that is in charge of autonomously monitor temperature and humidity in the whole data center room environment. After that the robot have built a map of the data center room, it is able to localize in the map and performs localized measurements at different locations. Those measurements are stored and can be visualized by the user thanks to a web Graphical User Interface (GUI). The solution emulates an Environmental Sensor Network, a very popular solution for precise monitoring in these environments. The robot trajectories and the localized measurements can be easily reconfigured from the same GUI. For this reason, we name it a Virtual Sensor Network (VSN). In this work, we discuss the implementation choices and present some results collected during a use case experiment in a real environment.