A Mobile Robotic System for Data Center Thermal Environment Measurement and Reconstruction

Data centers are the key infrastructure for information services. The monitoring of the thermal environment of the data center computer room is an important work for its safe operation. This paper proposed a mobile robotic system for data center thermal environment measurement, which can freely sample the temperature and humidity data around the facilities within the computer room. On one hand, measuring the temperature and humidity in a mobile way can obtain far more environmental data than fixed-point sensors. On the other hand, the mobile robot can be used instead of manual inspection. In addition, a temperature field reconstruction method is provided based on the sampled temperature data. Theoretically, the temperature of locations that have not been measured can be evaluated by interpolating sample temperature around them. The reconstruction of the temperature field can present the variation of the temperature more clearly and help find the hot spots or locations with low cooling efficiency during the operation. Lastly, experiments are carried out to study the measurement error of the mobile robotic system and an error correction method is proposed. After that, the relationship between the temperature reconstruction error and the layout of sampling points is investigated.