Use of Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Fine-Grained Roadside Air Pollution Monitoring

With increasing numbers of motor vehicles, vehicle exhaust gas has become one of the most important sources of urban air pollutants. After being emitted from the motor vehicle, exhaust gas spreads through the air along the road and is gradually deposited in the surrounding area, having an adverse impact on pedestrians and residents. At present, most research on vehicle exhaust directly measures the total emissions from the exhaust pipe or monitors the time variation of air pollutants at the roadside by setting roadside monitoring stations. The spatial resolution of these two methods is very low, however, and it is impossible to describe accurately the diffusion patterns of exhaust gas in the atmosphere after discharge. Some scholars have conducted research on the quality of roadside air by hand-held portable devices, but these are limited by the speed of travel, and the spatial and temporal resolution of the acquired data is also very low. By using multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and portable equipment, this study demonstrates an atmospheric environment monitoring system based on multi-rotor UAV by designing corresponding hardware circuits and software programs. With flexible requirements for takeoff or landing sites and high maneuverability of multi-rotor UAVs, the system increases the capability for high resolution spatial and temporal monitoring of the diffusion of traffic-emitted pollutants. The system can conduct fixed-point measurement by hovering, and can also measure air pollutants in complex urban terrain, providing an innovation in the study of vehicle exhaust gas diffusion.