Developing a Modular Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Platform for Air Pollution Profiling

Abstract

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) offers great potential for collecting air quality data with high spatial and temporal resolutions. The objective of this study is to design and develop a modular UAV-based platform capable of real-time monitoring of multiple air pollutants. The system comprises five modules: the UAV, the ground station, the sensors, the data acquisition (DA) module, and the data fusion (DF) module. The hardware was constructed with off-the-shelf consumer parts and the open source software Ardupilot was used for flight control and data fusion. The prototype UAV system was tested in representative settings. Results show that this UAV platform can fly on pre-determined pathways with adequate flight time for various data collection missions. The system simultaneously collects air quality and high precision X-Y-Z data and integrates and visualizes them in a real-time manner. While the system can accommodate multiple gas sensors, UAV operations may electronically interfere with the performance of chemical-resistant sensors. Our prototype and experiments prove the feasibility of the system and show that it features a stable and high precision spatial-temporal platform for air sample collection. Future work should be focused on gas sensor development, plug-and-play interfaces, impacts of rotor wash, and all-weather designs.

Autonomous monitoring, analysis, and countering of air pollution using environmental drones

“…Previous published work has demonstrated that drones can be used to acquire air pollution concentrations (Altstadter et al, 2015;Alvear et al, 2017;Babaan et al, 2018;Berman et al, 2012;Brady et al, 2016;Chang et al, 2018;Chilinski et al, 2018;Corrigan et al, 2008;Fladeland et al, 2011;Gu et al, 2018;Illingworth et al, 2014;Lawrence and Balsley, 2013;Mayer et al, 2012;Ramana et al, 2007;Ramanathan, 2006;Ruiz-Jimenez et al, 2019;Reuder et al, 2012;Smidi and Hofman, 2013;www.scmp.com;Villa et al, 2016;Vo et al, 2018;Watai et al, 2006). However, the ability of a drone to automatically detect when the concentration of a pollutant has exceeded the recommended threshold has not been reported.…”

“…Air pollutant sensors are designed and manufactured mostly for use in a stable environment (e.g. stationary on the ground), and are extremely sensitive to changes in the environment (Gu et al, 2018). Improvements will need to be made to shield the onboard air pollution sensors from the UAV's electronic interference to ensure accurate AQHI measurements.…”

“…Drones have been investigated as a means to detect environmental air pollution (Altstadter et al, 2015;Brady et al, 2016;Chang et al, 2018;Chilinski et al, 2018;Corrigan et al, 2008;Lawrence and Balsley, 2013;Mayer et al, 2012;Ramana et al, 2007;Ramanathan 2006;Reuder et al, 2012;Smidi and Hofman, 2013;www.scmp.com;techrepublic.com;www.auav.com.au;www.nationaldrones.com.au;Villa et al, 2016;Vo et al, 2018;Watai et al, 2006). CO 2 , CH 4 , Particulate Matter (PM), NO 2 , volatile organic compounds (VOCs), ozone, and water vapor concentrations have been successfully measured (Alvear et al, 2017;Babaan et al, 2018;Berman et al, 2012;Fladeland et al, 2011;Gu et al, 2018;Illingworth et al, 2014;Ruiz-Jimenez et al, 2019). UAV vision guided aerial-ground air quality sensing system, to monitor and forecast AQI distributions in spatial-temporal perspectives has been developed by Yang et al (2019).…”

Adversarial Impacts on Autonomous Decentralized Lightweight Swarms

“…Given the current state of the art in smart cities swarms, related technologies, and the lack of focus on security threats, Survey, security issues surrounding drones as well as mitigation techniques --+ -+ - [4] Public safety network between victims and first responders + ----- [5] Collaboration between two projects for park-cleaning swarm supervision + ---+ - [6] Real-time modular air pollutant modeling through UAV swarms…”

Accuracy of 3D Landscape Reconstruction without Ground Control Points Using Different UAS Platforms

“…The recent rapid development of relatively low-cost (<US$25,000) small unmanned aerial systems (UASs) (<25 kg) has resulted in their use in a myriad of disciplines. Applications in precision agriculture [1,2], archeological reconstruction [3,4], forestry [5,6], geomorphology [7][8][9], freshwater and marine systems [10][11][12], environmental monitoring [13,14], animal population studies [15][16][17][18], and recently, traffic accident reconstruction [19,20] are just a few of the fields where UASs have been exploited and continue to grow with enhanced platform capabilities (e.g., real-time analysis) [21], advanced sensors [22][23][24] and diverse software implementations [25,26]. The high accuracy and precision (i.e., cm error) of results obtained for 2D (e.g., orthomosaics) and 3D (e.g., digital surface model-DSM) mapping, based on structure from motion with multiview stereo photogrammetry (SfM-MVS), is transforming most disciplines where studies need to characterize areas Drones 2020, 4, 13 2 of 26 up to~100 hectares [1,27,28].…”