The PEST: Platform for Environmental Sensing Technology

Water quality monitoring is a critical task for safeguarding human health, understanding ecosystem balance, and informing regulatory policy in waterway use and maintenance. Direct bottle sampling is the standard for most water quality analysis, however it is limited in both space and time resolution by virtue of ex situ analysis. This inspires the need for in situ observation systems. Unmanned mobile platforms provide the capability for real-time response and spatial coverage. Current platforms for water quality monitoring tend to be expensive to build and maintain, or are large and difficult to deploy. Since even basic water measurements (e.g., temperature, pH) provide useful information about the health of an environment, we leverage the use of open-source low-cost probes on a small unmanned platform. The Platform for Environmental Sensing Technology (PEST), is a first prototype towards a persistent low-cost unmanned water quality monitoring solution for shallow, narrow, and difficult environments that is suitable for deployment by non-robotics experts.