An autonomous wireless platform for the remote inspection of pollutants

Abstract

Human operators for monitoring areas with high-concentration of toxic substances incur to an elevated risk of diseases. For this reason, the employment of autonomous systems (e.g. unmanned aerial vehicles) are considered one of the safest ways to remotely monitoring these locations. In this work, we developed an autonomous system for real-time monitoring pollutants. The proposed solution is made up by the following functional blocks; first, an unmanned aerial vehicle which hosts a multi-sensors board and a wireless collector to transfer real-time data; second, a base station composed by a reconfigurable antenna to provide a constant and reliable wireless communication by directing the radiated beam toward the aerial vehicle. In addition, the base station provides analytical tools to assist the competent authorities on the decision of intervention. The overall system has validated in the landfill of Cerro Tanaro (ASTI), Italy, in which sensing, wireless communication and storage to cloud have been tested. Regarding the wireless tracking system we demonstrated that, by using a common IEEE802.11b/g module, the configuration process of the antenna beam takes only 2 s to improve the channel condition.