Air Quality Monitoring using Drone

In recent years, the focus on environmental pollution has increased. The need arose to monitor air quality not only in town but also in remote and inaccessible areas. The solution proposed in this article is a low-cost remote monitoring system of dangerous areas based on drones. On the one hand, an operator positions the drone where measurements need to be taken. On the other hand there is a central station that performs the storing of the measurements, processes the data and sends them to the web application. A monitoring system based on LoRa (Long Range), a low-power wireless technology covering long distances, was mounted on the drone. The sensors have been chosen to be reliable while keeping low-cost. The microcontroller used for system management is APM 2.8 flight controller. Communication to the central station is via the MQTT protocol. This system allows the monitoring of air quality showing accurate and real time results on the web application For this, a Wi-Fi module, namely ESP8266 has been used. At a later stage of the project, a GPS module would be attached which would give the coordinates of the place to where the drone is travelling.