Conmmnity-based public authoring with mobiele chemical sensor networks

The Robotic Feral Public Authoring (RFPA) project seeks to combine low-cost robotics with geo-annotation in an innovative way for a novel approach to galvanising social activism on a local level around environmental issues. Adapting commercially available toy robots and remotely controlled vehicles with a variety of sensors and uploading the readings to a spatial annotation database for visualisation, we aim to explore new ways in which the exclusiveness of pollution sensing and robotics can be dispelled and a new sense of empowerment promoted. In this paper we introduce the current version of a mobile chemical sensor network node which forms the core of such an RFPA built around the Urban Tapestries platform. Finally, we report on our recent experiences during tests and community workshops at the London fields park in East London