Autonomous Chemical-Sensing Aerial Robot for Urban/Suburban Environmental Monitoring

This paper describes the development of an autonomous chemical-sensing aerial robotic system for environmental monitoring in urban and suburban areas. The robot is equipped with a high-performance chemical sensor that identifies and quantifies chemical agents, enabling applications, such as chemical mapping, source localization, and estimation. To enable collision-free monitoring in areas with obstacles, such as in urban and suburban environments where buildings, trees, and other structures pose a challenge, a potential-field algorithm that incorporates past actions is used. A custom-designed ground station for controlling the robot, and planning and visualizing environmental data in real time is described. An empirical method is used to maximize the robot's flight time for improved effective operating range and to provide a safe operating standoff distance. Finally, two outdoor chemical dispersion experiments are conducted to demonstrate the capabilities of the autonomous airborne chemical-sensing system, where results show effective mapping of a propane gas leak.