Environmental quality monitoring with unmanned aircraft vehicle

The paper discusses issues related to the possibility of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as an alternative to stationary analyses in the assessment of environmental quality, with particular emphasis on air pollutants such as particulate matter (PM), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), formaldehyde and SO₂. In the course of the study, a simple mobile and automated measuring equipment was developed, with a miniaturized and lightweight design, which made it possible to place it on board of an unmanned aircraft. The applied solutions, including electrochemical sensors, allow to measure concentrations of specific substances or aspiration of samples from selected places for further analyses in a stationary laboratory. Thanks to communication with web server, the results can be collected online. Unlike stationary measurement methods, the mobility of unmanned aerial vehicles allows to obtain a larger number of measurement points from a larger area, which in turn allows to map zones particularly exposed to emissions and to assess the existing hazards on an ongoing basis.