Abstract
Monitoring and analysis of open air basins is a critical task in waste water plant management. These tasks generally require sampling waters at several hard to access points, be it real time with multiparametric sensor probes, or retrieving water samples. Full automation of these processes would require deploying hundreds (if not thousands) of fixed sensors, unless the sensors can be translated. This work proposes the utilization of robotized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms to work as a virtual high density sensor network, which could analyze in real time or capture samples depending on the robotic UAV equipment. To check the validity of the concept, an instance of the robotized UAV platform has been fully designed and implemented. A multi-agent system approach has been used (implemented over a Robot Operating System, ROS, middleware layer) to define a software architecture able to deal with the different problems, optimizing modularity of the software; in terms of hardware, the UAV platform has been designed and built, as a sample capturing probe. A description on the main features of the multi-agent system proposed, its architecture, and the behavior of several components is discussed. The experimental validation and performance evaluation of the system components has been performed independently for the sake of safety: autonomous flight performance has been tested on-site; the accuracy of the localization technologies deemed as deployable options has been evaluated in controlled flights; and the viability of the sample capture device designed and built has been experimentally tested.
Highlights
Changes in industrial scale processes have usually been introduced by the development of new technical innovations
These advanced systems can beat the human at specific tasks with ease, but only if everything related to the task is properly accounted, modelled, or built to precise specifications, making it hard to change
In monitoring and process management areas, where human expertise accumulated over years can be hard to model or represent in mathematical way, the best results achieved by the advanced systems are produced by using them as specialized
Summary
Changes in industrial scale processes have usually been introduced by the development of new technical innovations. A new system is designed and partially tested, where a network of robotized UAVs, each of them with autonomous decision-taking capabilities to minimize risks, is used created a virtual “high density” sensor network, capable of sampling any surface point of the tanks and basins, as if thousands of sensors had been deployed. This sampling process can be performed with a newly designed and simplified sampling probe, or using a multiparametric sensor. The contributions and advantages of the proposed system are presented and discussed, laying pending issues to solve and future lines of work
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
