Mapping Gaseous Pollutant Using Quadcopter on Autonomous Waypoint Navigation

Abstract

Air pollution is a condition in which air quality is damaged and contaminated with substances that are harmful to living things. Along with the increase in the number of motorized vehicles and industrial areas in Indonesia can increase the level of air pollution. Generally, monitoring systems for air pollution are carried out using gas sensors at certain points. However, this method takes a lot of time and cost, as well as low spatial resolution for a wide area. The quadcopter is a type of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle that can move automatically according to the tracking system based on the waypoints of the Global Positioning System. In this study, a quadcopter equipped with a gas sensor is used to map air pollution levels. Mission Planner software is used to determine the waypoints of the quadcopter. The proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control is used to maintain the altitude of the quadcopter while hovering. The gas level can be stored and accessed online on the webserver, in which the results of the gas mapping are displayed on Google Earth. The experiment results show that the measurement of carbon monoxide using the semiconductor gas sensor has an error of 9.6%. The quadcopter can route all the provided waypoints for its navigation. The quadcopter can also maintain the height according to the offered altitude setpoints with a steady-state error of 21.4 % and 15.75%, respectively.