ARIA: Air Pollutants Monitoring Using UAVs

Abstract

UAV technology, and specifically networks and swarms, have been an open research topic for many years. This is because of their potentially huge benefits at an affordable cost in a wide range of tasks. UAVs are commonly used in public and private fields. Their usefulness still comes with a price and some serious limitations, not completely surpassed yet. There are many proposals for protocols and algorithms trying to improve drone swarms but they are massively dependent on the actual scenarios and use cases. UAVs can fill a gap in modern Wireless Sensor Network, mostly because of their mobility and ability to fly at different heights. While drone swarms are prolific research topics, there is almost no interest investigating benefits of vertical deployment of this technology. It is proven that air pollution changes abruptly even at relatively short distances, both horizontally and vertically. We aim to provide a new tool to study air quality at different heights that even private citizens could afford. We will present an overview of ARIA project, a vertical drone swarm for air pollution monitoring. Considering the scope of our project, we will only utilize low-cost UAVs and sensors. Knowing the hard challenges inherent to UAVs and environmental monitoring, we're looking at preliminary results but we think this will become a valuable proof-of-concept for further research.