Drone-Assisted Monitoring of Atmospheric Pollution—A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

Ambient air quality is a complex issue that depends on multiple interacting factors related to emissions coming from energy production and use, transportation, industrial processes, agriculture, and waste and wastewater treatment sectors. It is also impacted by adverse meteorological conditions, pollutants concentrations, their transport and dispersion in the atmosphere, and topographic constraints. Therefore, air pollutants distribution is not uniform and their monitoring at proper temporal and spatial resolution is necessary. Drone-borne analytical instrumentation can fulfill these requirements. Thanks to the rapid development in the drone manufacturing sector as well as in the field of portable detectors construction, applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for atmospheric pollution monitoring are growing. The purpose of this work is to give an overview of this matter. Therefore, this paper contains basic information on UAVs (i.e., description of different types of drones with their advantages and disadvantages) and analytical instrumentation (i.e., low-cost gas sensors, multi-sensor systems, electronic noses, high-accuracy optical analyzers, optical particle counters, radiation detectors) used for the monitoring of airborne pollution. Different ways of payload integration are addressed and examples of commercially available solutions are given. Examples of applications of drone-borne analytical systems for pollution monitoring coming from natural (i.e., volcanoes, thawing permafrost, wildfires) and anthropological (i.e., urbanization and industrialization; extraction, transport and storage of fossil fuels; exploitation of radioactive materials; waste and wastewater treatment; agriculture) sources are also described. Finally, the current limitations and future perspectives are discussed. Although there is a great potential for drones applications in the field of atmospheric pollution monitoring, several limitations should be addressed in the coming years. Future research should focus on improving performances of available analytical instrumentation and solving problems related to insufficient payload capacity and limited flight time of commonly used drones. We predict that applications of drone-assisted measurements will grow in the following years, especially in the field of odor pollution monitoring.

Drone-Assisted Particulate Matter Measurement in Air Monitoring: A Patent Review

“…of Autonomous Hexacopter UAVs for ity Air Quality Management [43] PM2.5 2023 onitoring and forecasting using smart rrent neural network for sustainable deopment in Chennai city [44] Liquid petroleum gas, propane, CH4, H2, PM2. Review articles concerning drone-assisted air quality monitoring such as [25,51] have been published. However, available reviews focus on scientific literature and may lack technical solutions found in the patent literature.…”

“…Although analyzing scientific literature regarding drone-assisted air pollution monitoring is not the scope of this work, some examples of scientific journal publications on this field are presented in Table 2. Review articles concerning drone-assisted air quality monitoring such as [25,51] have been published. However, available reviews focus on scientific literature and may lack technical solutions found in the patent literature.…”

“…Mobile air quality sensors allow measuring air quality in large areas using a single device [23]. They can be placed, among other carriers, in terrestrial vehicles, wearable devices (e.g., a personal air monitor), and drones [22,[24][25][26][27]. These last devices allow for measuring air quality at different distances from the ground (around 100 m for rotary-wing drones, and 3 km for fixed-wing drones) [1,28].…”

Air Quality Monitoring and Analysis for Sustainable Development of Solid Waste Dump Yards Using Smart Drones and Geospatial Technology

“…The study area for this research was the Kodungaiyur dump yard located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, as represented in Figure 2. This landfill site is one of the largest and oldest in Chennai, span- These sensors provided a comprehensive picture of air quality conditions in the solid waste dump yard, which is critical for identifying potential health hazards and implementing appropriate mitigation measures [50][51][52]. Our data collection approach involved drones with sensors deployed at varying altitudes of 3 m, 6 m, and 9 m. The study area underwent data collection at regular intervals of 3 months, corresponding to March, June, and September within a single year 2022.…”

Remote detection and monitoring of post-mining heat island

“…Data for remote sensing studies of heap and tailings ponds high temperatures or fire effects can be obtained by thermal sensors placed on satellites, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), or by thermal handheld cameras (Nádudvari, 2014;Abramowicz and Chybiorz, 2019;Nádudvari et al, 2020;Nádudvari et al, 2021a). Active remote sensing techniques are also used, performing surveys from satellite radar data (Akcin et al, 2007;Jiang et al, 2011;Nádudvari, 2014;Nádudvari et al, 2020;Nádudvari et al, 2021a;Karanam et al, 2021;Yu et al, 2022) or from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data acquired from a UAV airstrike (McKenna et al, 2017;Nguyen et al, 2021;Jońca et al, 2022). With these techniques it is possible to study landslides and land subsidence due to fire.…”