Environmental Risk Assessment Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

Now a day, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are significantly employed in various fields like military applications, regular civilian purposes, aerial photography, field surveillance, disaster relief etc. Among all, one of the most challenging application is environmental risk assessment i.e. recognition of gas leakage and monitoring of volatile chemical concentration in a particular area. It is a promising approach to control environmental pollution. In this paper, the authors developed an automatic environmental risk assessment system using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The proposed UAV based system designed with a 32-bit MCU along with smart gas sensing system, data storing and real time feedback capabilities. The UAV system comprises of four arms with four motors for lifting. Motors are connected to the ESC (Electronic Speed controller) for varying its speed. These ESC’s are connected to APM 2.8 controller board which is connected to the fly sky receiver. As the field is quite recent, few efforts has been dedicated to develop integrated sensing system which focus on the optimization of crucial features as weight, dimensions and energy autonomy. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, some field experiments are performed using a prototype hardware UAV model. Keywords: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Electronic Speed Controller, MCU unit, Gas Sensing Unit