An Adapted Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Environmental Water Sampling

Abstract

In this work an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was adapted to be used as an environmental tool to collect water samples of sea, estuary, and mangrove for further analysis by gas chromatography with a mass detector (GC-MS). The sampling automated system was based on a microcontroller, a solenoid valve, and a peristaltic mini-pump that was coupled to a quadcopter UAV. The apparatus was properly calibrated to acquire 100 mL of environmental water at 4.6 min. After, the concentration of BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and o, m, p-xylenes) was analyzed in laboratory using GC-MS and the BTEX concentration ranged from 0.3 to 5.0 µg L-1 with a recovery from 83.9 to 118% with a relative standard deviation lower than 7.0%. Tests of cross-contamination were performed by simultaneous sampling and laboratory blank was carried out and no contamination was found for BTEX analysis. Based on the results, the adapted UAV presented a very useful ability to collect samples in difficult access areas such as mangroves, points between rocks, corals reefs, without health risk and without impacting the fragile ecosystem being an interesting tool for environmental purposes.

Unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and control of vectors of malaria and other vector-borne diseases

“…UAVs are commonly used for mapping in conservation, agriculture, invasive species detection and other areas [14,15,25], with their use in the detecting and controlling mosquito-borne disease increasingly investigated in recent years [19,22,[26][27][28]. The abundance and distribution of malaria transmitting mosquitoes is dependent on the availability of water bodies to act as breeding sites [29].…”

“…Consequently, it is essential for malaria researchers and control programmes to focus on novel technologies that aid the surveillance of vectors and the delivery of control agents, with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) being one of the promising possible additions to the toolkit [4]. The use of UAVs has seen a considerable expansion from limited military use to their being utilized in a range of scientific and industrial applications, including agricultural remote sensing [5][6][7], response to and prevention of pest outbreaks [8,9], zoonosis control [10], humanitarian emergency response [11,12], public health [13] and species monitoring for conservation [14,15]. The idea of using UAVs in malaria control has been postulated for many years [4,16].…”

Lab-on-a-Drone: remote voltammetric analysis of lead in water with real-time data transmission

“…However, in general, analytical methods for quantication of these contaminants are time-consuming and require expensive, laborious techniques, and highly qualied professionals. [5][6][7] In addition, when collecting environmental samples, researchers are generally exposed to dangerous places, susceptible to accidents, and there is a possibility of exposure to a range of toxic compounds. 5 Thus, to overcome these drawbacks, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) represents a safe and efficient option.…”

“…[5][6][7] In addition, when collecting environmental samples, researchers are generally exposed to dangerous places, susceptible to accidents, and there is a possibility of exposure to a range of toxic compounds. 5 Thus, to overcome these drawbacks, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) represents a safe and efficient option. UAVs are xed-wing aircras with sensors (generally used to avoid collisions) and cameras.…”

“…[13][14][15][16][17] However, many of these measurements employ analytical methods with limited selectivity. 5,19 Thus, the miniaturization of additional instrumentation could open additional avenues to monitor specic contaminants. 20,21 Among other alternatives, Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC) devices can provide some competitive advantages over traditional analytical platforms, such as the possibility to perform sampling, ltration, pre-concentration, separation, and detection in a single device.…”