A Consumer UAV-based Air Quality Monitoring System for Smart Cities

Growing concerns on air pollution in large cities urge the development of new smart cities technologies to monitor and improve air quality of the cities. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is getting attentions in air monitoring applications due to its high maneuverability in both horizontal and vertical dimensions to obtain high-spatial-resolution and near-surface vertical profiling of atmosphere pollution. Low cost micro-sensors add additional advantages to UAVs to offer numerous advantages for capturing the spatial and temporal variability of air pollutants. Despite all these exciting prospects, challenges need to be studied and addressed to exploit UAV technologies for air quality monitoring. This work designs and develops a consumer UAV-based air quality monitoring system with off-the-shelf consumer components. The design enables a UAV to carry multiple sensors to accomplish real-time monitoring of multiple air pollutants. Our prototype and experiments verify the feasibility of the system and show that it features a stable and high precision spatial-temporal platform for air sample collection.