Intelligent Wide-Area Water Quality Monitoring and Analysis System Exploiting Unmanned Surface Vehicles and Ensemble Learning

Abstract

Water environment pollution is an acute problem, especially in developing countries, so water quality monitoring is crucial for water protection. This paper presents an intelligent three-dimensional wide-area water quality monitoring and online analysis system. The proposed system is composed of an automatic cruise intelligent unmanned surface vehicle (USV), a water quality monitoring system (WQMS), and a water quality analysis algorithm. An automatic positioning cruising system is constructed for the USV. The WQMS consists of a series of low-power water quality detecting sensors and a lifting device that can collect the water quality monitoring data at different water depths. These data are analyzed by the proposed water quality analysis algorithm based on the ensemble learning method to estimate the water quality level. Then, a real experiment is conducted in a lake to verify the feasibility of the proposed design. The experimental results obtained in real application demonstrate good performance and feasibility of the proposed monitoring system.