A Smart System for Monitoring the Building Infrastructure and Utility

Abstract. Many commercial buildings embrace various utility services such as heating and ventilation, mechanical piping, electricity system, elevators, and smart control systems. Moreover, especially work centres and institutions houses important assets and data. Especially at night when the staff and the visitors were not inside the building any malfunctioning or a natural hazard caused failed utility may cause unexpected losses and damages. Smart control systems of the building may not always notice the root cause of the malfunctioning and this may even be able to make the side effects of malfunctioning cause adverse consequences. In this study, an autonomous rover vehicle is introduced in order to detect any event causes damage to the building is introduced. The vehicle can rover inside the building and precisely locate itself by detecting its position and orientation by sinus theorem based positioning algorithm. Dedicated sensor holders were produced from 3D printers and laser distance measurement sensors were mounted on the sensor holder. The motors are controlled by motor controllers with h-bridge and pulse width modulation. Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller controls the motors of the vehicle and makes necessary calculations to detect vehicle position and orientation. The rover can detect any adverse event by its optic camera. The leakage from the heating system of the civil engineering building located inside İnönü University was detected by the system. This proposed system provides important opportunity for timely detection of malfunctioning of the utility systems of the buildings.