A multipurpose drone for water sampling & video surveillance

This paper presents a cost-effective multipurpose drone equipped with multiple functionalities including water floating mechanism, water sampling, onboard sensor enabled water & air quality monitoring, live video surveillance using GPS and video recording capability. The proposed system integrates a water floating mechanism on the system capable of landing & floating on water surface with high degree of stability & precision. It can collect water samples with 50 ml to 100 ml per flight from surface of water sources including pits, ponds etc with stable water current. The system is equipped with video & image surveillance mechanism on the board with GPS and video recording capability. We have equipped high quality Go-Pro 6 HD action camera on our UAV. The system is capable of sending high quality live video/image feeds directly to the base station in real time. It is also equipped with CO & AQI gas sensors to monitor air samples at multiple locations & provide live feeds on air quality index to base stations for its further analysis on quality. This paper presents a working model & results of few experiments that are carried out at initial level. The system has been tested on few parameters including sampling rate, cost effectiveness, efficiency, water & air quality index, payload, video surveillance etc. This work is a part of the research project funded by our affiliating university “A.P.J Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow, U.P, India.