Design and Development of an Autonomous Air Quality Monitoring Drone

Abstract

Air quality monitoring of any specific location is important for continuous improvement of air quality and protecting public health. We demonstrate the design and development of an autonomous copter-type air quality monitoring drone to measure the amount of CO2 and CO present in the ambient air of any desired trajectory. We also measured the temperature, pressure, and humidity of the surrounding air. The proposed low cost drone is small in size, light weight, easy to maintain, and capable of flying a long distance. In addition to autonomous control, the proposed drone can be manually controlled using a long-range remote controller. The maximum altitude of the drone from the ground control station is approximately 500 m, whereas the maximum velocity is 50 km/hour. During air quality monitoring, we collected the air quality data from 1 feet to 200 feet with 20 feet interval where the average velocity of the drone was 5.4 km/hour. We selected three different locations for data collection. Afterwards, we analyzed the collected data and determined the primary causes of variation in the CO2 and CO concentration of various locations under different altitudes. We strongly believe that, the proposed drone will be useful for collecting location specific air quality information and taking necessary actions to reduce air pollution.