Development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and IoT System for Water Quality Monitoring and Water Sampling

Abstract

Regular monitoring of water quality has become increasingly important due to rising pollution levels, which seriously harm human health, aquatic ecosystems, and decrease the performance of water treatment plants. Nowadays, monitoring water quality can be accomplished by traditional methods (e.g., taking samples and analysing them in a laboratory) and by water quality monitoring stations. These methods can only detect pollution as it occurs and spreads to the monitored areas. It is essential to develop a system capable of detecting pollution events early, allowing authorities to respond in a timely manner. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has emerged as an alternative approach for water monitoring for a large scale of reservoirs. The reason lies in the fact that, UAV equipped with remote sensing techniques and sensor nodes can be flexibly deployed to different places to collect water quality data in both spatial and temporal variations and are suitable for early detection of water pollution before it widely spreads. This paper proposed an efficient UAV platform integrated with IoT system to enhance efficacy of water quality monitoring and water sampling. In particular, an effective IoT framework combining LoRa and 4G communication networks improves data acquisition and facilitates control over long distances. Meanwhile, the UAV, with a high payload capacity, ensures the collection of sufficient water samples for laboratory analysis. The water quality data is also transmitted to a web server for storage, real-time visualization, and analysis. To demonstrate the efficacy of the UAV-assisted water quality monitoring system, it is applied to measure pH, total suspended solids (TSS), and temperature parameters, and to collect water samples from an area of the lake. The data collected by the UAV system is compared with the results obtained from laboratory analysis of water samples, revealing that the developed UAV system, while capable of being deployed flexibly over large areas, provides relatively accurate results and significantly reduces labor costs associated with water sampling.