SkySense: LoRa-Enabled Autonomous Weather Monitoring Drone

This paper has presented SkySense, a design for a LoRa-enabled weather-monitoring quadcopter built on an STM32F411 flight controller and an STM32F401 weather and telemetry node. The drone sends temperature, humidity, air-quality indicators, position, altitude, speed and battery voltage to an ESP32 ground station, which displays the data and forwards it to Google Cloud. The components, architecture, packet format, operating procedure and analytical estimates of airtime, path loss and hover endurance were described, and a plan for evaluating sensor accuracy, range, delivery rate, latency and endurance was defined. Related work has examined UAV environmental sensing and LoRa-UAV integration separately; SkySense proposes to combine them on low-cost hardware with a transparent evaluation. The system is at the design stage and no performance has been demonstrated. Its limitations include the sensor exposure problem, short flight time and limited payload, the dependence of LoRa range on the environment, and regulatory restrictions.

[1]             T. F. Villa, F. Gonzalez, B. Miljievic, Z. D. Ristovski and L. Morawska, "An overview of small unmanned aerial vehicles for air quality measurements: Present applications and future prospectives," Sensors, vol. 16, no. 7, Art. 1072, 2016. [2]             J. D. Jacob, P. B. Chilson, A. L. Houston and S. W. Smith, "Considerations for atmospheric measurements with small unmanned aircraft systems," Atmosphere, vol. 9, no. 7, Art. 252, 2018. [3]             A. Augustin, J. Yi, T. Clausen and W. M. Townsley, "A study of LoRa: Long range & low power networks for the Internet of Things," Sensors, vol. 16, no. 9, Art. 1466, 2016. [4]             J. Petäjäjärvi, K. Mikhaylov, M. Pettissalo, J. Janhunen and J. Iinatti, "Performance of a low-power wide-area network based on LoRa technology: Doppler robustness, scalability, and coverage," Int. J. Distributed Sensor Networks, vol. 13, no. 3, 2017. [5]             F. Adelantado, X. Vilajosana, P. Tuset-Peiro, B. Martinez, J. Melia-Segui and T. Watteyne, "Understanding the limits of LoRaWAN," IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 55, no. 9, pp. 34–40, 2017. [6]             N. Ya'acob, M. Zolkapli, J. Johari, A. L. Yusof, S. S. Sarnin and A. Z. Asmadinar, "UAV environment monitoring system," in Proc. 2017 Int. Conf. Electrical, Electronics and System Engineering (ICEESE), IEEE, 2017, pp. 105–109. [7]             M. Sajid, Y. J. Yang, G. B. Kim and K. H. Choi, "Remote monitoring of environment using multi-sensor wireless node installed on quad-copter drone," in Proc. 2016 IEEE Int. Symp. Robotics and Intelligent Sensors (IRIS), 2016, pp. 213–216. [8]             B. Potter, G. Valentino, L. Yates, T. Benzing and A. Salman, "Environmental monitoring using a drone-enabled wireless sensor network," in Proc. 2019 Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium (SIEDS), IEEE, 2019, pp. 1–6. [9]             H. J. Jumaah, B. Kalantar, A. A. Halin, S. Mansor, N. Ueda and S. J. Jumaah, "Development of UAV-based PM2.5 monitoring system," Drones, vol. 5, no. 3, Art. 60, 2021. [10]           L. Barbieri et al., "Intercomparison of small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) measurements for atmospheric science during the LAPSE-RATE campaign," Sensors, vol. 19, no. 9, Art. 2179, 2019.