Design, Development and Evaluation of a UAV to Study Air Quality in Qatar
This addresses air quality monitoring challenges in Qatar, but it is incremental as it applies existing UAV and sensor technologies to a specific domain.
The researchers tackled air quality monitoring by developing a partially autonomous UAV equipped with sensors to collect real-time data on gases like CO and CO2 in Qatar, with field tests conducted at Al Shamal airport yielding proof-of-concept results.
Measuring gases for air quality monitoring is a challenging task that claims a lot of time of observation and large numbers of sensors. The aim of this project is to develop a partially autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with sensors, in order to monitor and collect air quality real time data in designated areas and send it to the ground base. This project is designed and implemented by a multidisciplinary team from electrical and computer engineering departments. The electrical engineering team responsible for implementing air quality sensors for detecting real time data and transmit it from the plane to the ground. On the other hand, the computer engineering team is in charge of Interface sensors and provide platform to view and visualize air quality data and live video streaming. The proposed project contains several sensors to measure Temperature, Humidity, Dust, CO, CO2 and O3. The collected data is transmitted to a server over a wireless internet connection and the server will store, and supply these data to any party who has permission to access it through android phone or website in semi-real time. The developed UAV has carried several field tests in Al Shamal airport in Qatar, with interesting results and proof of concept outcomes.