Development and Testing of a Low-Cost, Trackable Portable Sensor Node for Ambient Monitoring in Automated Laboratories

In automated laboratories, ambient monitoring and precise object tracking are essential for safety and system reliability. In this paper, we present the development and evaluation of a low-cost, portable sensor node for environmental sensing and ultrawideband (UWB) based localization. The sensor node integrates a set of commercial gas sensors for measuring environmental parameters and an ultra-wideband unit for object tracking. The device has an IoT microcontroller that can efficiently process the data from both environmental sensors and the location information from the UWB module and transmit it wirelessly to the cloud/monitoring server via Wi-Fi user datagram protocol (UDP). A custom Python application was developed for real-time monitoring, implementing trilateration and least-squares algorithms for accurate indoor positioning. Experimental results showed a location accuracy better than 50 cm under line-of-sight conditions.