The Effects of Speed and Altitude on Wireless Air Pollution Measurements using Hexacopter Drone

Air pollution has a severe impact on human beings and one of the top risks facing human health. The data collection near pollution sources is difficult to obtain due to obstacles such as industrial and rural areas, where sensing usually fails to give enough information about the air quality. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with different sensors offer new approaches and opportunity to air pollution and atmospheric studies. Despite that, there are new challenges that emerged with using UAVs, in particular, the effect of wind-generated from UAVs propellers rotation on the efficiency and ability to sense and measure gas concentrations. The results of gas measurement are affected by the propellers rotation and the wind resistance. Thus, the effect of changing UAV speed and altitude on the gas measurement both vertically and horizontally need to be performed. The aims of this paper is to propose a new mobile-wireless air pollution system composed of UAV equipped with low-cost sensors using LoRa transmission. The proposed system is evaluated by studying the effect of changing altitude and speed on the measured gas concentrations CO, LPG, H2, and smoke when flying in horizontally and vertically directions. The results showed that our system is capable of measuring CO, LPG, H2, and smoke in the vertical mode in both hovering and deploying scenarios. While in horizontal mode the results showed that system can detect and measure gas concentrations at speeds less than or equal to 6 m/s. While at high speed of 8 and 10 m/s there will be an impact on its performance and accuracy to detect the targeted gases. Also, the results showed that the LoRa shield and Radio transmitter AT9S can successfully transmit up to 800 m horizontally and 400 feet vertically.

@article{Noori2020,
  title     = {The Effects of Speed and Altitude on Wireless Air Pollution Measurements using Hexacopter Drone},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {11},
  number    = {9},
  year      = {2020},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Rami Noori and Dahlila Putri Dahnil},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0110931},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0110931}
}