Air Quality Index Monitoring and Mapping Using UAV

Air pollution is one of the major problems in today's century. Day by day with increasing population the air pollution is also increasing at a drastic rate. Without proper means of measuring and controlling the air pollution it can prove to be lethal for the world. Current technology uses fixed sensors over structures separated by some distance to calculate the air quality index of a city or area. This method is not cost effective and uses more resources as each structure is fitted with the same number of sensors and hence each system from every building will contribute to the energy consumption. Also, it is very difficult to measure air quality index (AQI) in rural areas where there are no tall structures. This paper proposes a new way to measure the air quality index with the help of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). In this paper, a cheap UAV is used and only a limited number of sensors are mounted on it, since the UAV used in the project wouldn't be able to carry heavy weight. A new hardware is designed for the AQI transmitter and the base station. The transmitter hardware is mounted on the UAV which collects and sends data to the base station. The data from the base station is sent to a cloud platform. Then this data is processed for real time mapping.