Industrial Internet of Things at work: a case study analysis in Robotic-aided environmental monitoring

Nowadays, Internet of things (IoT) and robotic systems are key drivers of technological innovation trends. Leveraging the advantages of both technologies, IoT-aided robotic systems can disclose a disruptive potential of opportunities The present contribution provides an experimental analysis of an IoT-aided robotic system for environmental monitoring. To this end, an experimental testbed has been developed. It is composed of: (i) an IoT device connected to (ii) an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which executes a patrolling mission within a specified area, where (iii) an IoT network has been deployed to sense environmental data. An extensive experimental campaign has been carried out to scavenge pros and cons of adopted technologies. The key results of the authors analysis show that: (i) the UAV does not incur any significant overhead due to onboard IoT equipment and (ii) the overall quality of service expressed in terms of network joining time, data retrieval delay and packet loss ratio satisfies the mission requirements. These results enable further development in larger-scale environment.