Advances in water sample collections with a drone – A review

Abstract

Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been becoming more popular in a variety of industries in recent years, and their popularity is growing continually. These UAVs' rapid development and implementations offer an efficient solution and emerging possibilities for environmental monitoring. UAVs have become a common method for tracking complex environmental processes due to flight scheduling versatility, cost-effectiveness, and high spatial resolution. UAVs are being used in a variety of new applications. Cities all over the world are failing to combat water quality issues due to a shortage of technology capable of successfully supporting management actions. Water quality control and forecasting improvements in water characteristics necessitate the prompt storage of water samples. Drones have the ability to solve this problem. Drones have gained popularity among environmental researchers and water resources, but fewer attentions got for their ability for water sampling payloads. This paper aims to provide a systematic overview of recent contributions of drones with the capability of trapping water from bodies of water, such as drone-based sampling water payloads. The review's solutions are aimed at appealing to these limitations of drones to handle water samples, involving adapted drones with higher payload capacity, trying to simplify an arrest of more significant volumes of water, organizing fieldwork for operation outside visible sight, and integrating sustainable scientific investigative designs. It ends with discussing the problems and potential for possible exploration and applications concerning drone-based water sampling payloads.