Mobile Pollution Data Sensing Using UAVs

Nowadays, the impact of global warming is causing soci-eties to become more aware and responsive to environmen-tal problems. As a result, pollution sensing is gaining more relevance. In order to have a strict control over air quality, the use of mobile sensors is becoming a promising alterna-tive to traditional air quality stations. Mobile sensors allow to easily perform measurements in many di-erent places, thereby o-ering substantial improvements in terms of the spatial granularity of the data gathered. Pollution moni-toring near large industrial areas or in rural areas where transportation facilities are poor or inexistent can compli-cate the mobile sensing approach. To address this problem, in this paper we propose endowing Unmanned Aerial Vehi-cles (UAVs) with pollution sensors, allowing them to become autonomous air monitoring stations. The proposed solution has the potential to quickly cover a target region at a low cost, and providing great exibility.