Identifying high pollution level regions through a terrestrial mobile monitoring system

Abstract

Pollution has become an environmental concern that has put the prospects of a sustainable future at risk. Though technology is advancing at a rapid rate but the question of an eco-friendly living remains unanswered. With growing population figures, the transportation requirement is increasing at a significant rate but the vehicular pollution arising from surface transport has serious health hazards besides polluting the nature. This paper proposes the design of a Pollution Monitoring Mobile System (PMMS) that can monitor vehicular pollution in real-time along with the information about the area being monitored. The prototype consists of a primary unit, a mobile robot that has a combination of Arduino and Raspberry Pi micro-controller boards simulating a zero-pollution mobile electric vehicle equipped with features such as obstacle avoidance, video surveillance and GPS tracking, and has an on-board local server. The secondary unit consists of a pollution monitor that collects several kinds of data such as temperature, sound level and different gas levels. The pollution monitor uses an Arduino micro-controller board and a combination of different sensors and a Wi-Fi module. The combined data from the primary unit and the secondary unit is sent to the local server. The data from the local server can then be logged/stored on a cloud service for detailed analysis of the data. The initial performance evaluation results are encouraging. This system is a robust, flexible, easily deployable and an eco-friendly solution, in the domain of Internet of Things (IoT), to the ever concerning problem of pollution.