Electronic Nose and AUV: A Novel Perspective in Marine Pollution Monitoring

Abstract

A B S T R A C THydrocarbon pollution represents one of the most serious issues for the health of the extremely fragile marine ecosystem, and strategies for its monitoring have been growing in number and complexity in the last decades. Therefore, the realization of systems able to detect the presence of pollutants in the marine environment has become extremely complex, involving different figures and integrated technologies. This paper presents an innovative model for the real-time assessment of pollutants on the sea surface based on a network of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which are able to sail the sea surface, equipped with sensors capable of detecting volatile organic compounds produced by hydrocarbons. In particular, within this context, an AUV equipped with an electronic nose-like system is proposed, with the sensors employed that were characterized both on the laboratory bench and at sea. The results obtained confirmed the feasibility of the approach proposed as well as good reliability of the data acquired, confirming the likely employment of this system within an integrated marine monitoring tool.

Volatile Metabolites Emission by In Vivo Microalgae—An Overlooked Opportunity?

“…The availability of MS that can take measurements underwater (membrane inlet mass spectrometer, MIMS) has made underwater VOC analysis routine [ 248 ]. AUVs have been used to measure phytoplankton VOC emissions for monitoring marine pollution and surveilling the emergence of harmful algal blooms (HAB) [ 249 , 250 , 251 ]. There is a priori no reason to not be able to mount microsystems (vide supra) aboard AUVs/UAVs to expand autonomous investigations into in vivo microalgal VOC emanations.…”

Use of Electronic Noses in Seawater Quality Monitoring: a Systematic Review

“…Two further expansions of this application were also presented by the same group. The first one adopted the same approach including the eNose system within a moored buoy in order to combine dynamic (AUV) and static (buoy) monitoring of a given marine area [18], whereas the second one scaled the payload system in order to make room for future inclusion of such system within a real-time context of distributed monitoring [16].…”

“…Other approaches retrieved in this domain included the use of Photo-Ionization Detectors [15,16,18], however displaying significant issues with high humidity environments, and resistive detectors like the ones employed by Lozano and colleagues (2014).…”

RBPF-MSIS: Toward Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter SLAM for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle With Slow Mechanical Scanning Imaging Sonar

“…A Utonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have been applied for searching underwater resources and conducting various tasks such as underwater rescue [1], map building [2], climate change evaluation [3], and pollution monitoring [4], etc. To accomplish these tasks safely and reliably, AUVs should realize accurate localization in their operating environments, which is one of their fundamental abilities.…”