An autonomous swarm of drones for industrial gas sensing applications

To tackle the modern need for gas sensing, mobile and miniaturized sensors have been deployed for many use cases, including on remote driven vehicles. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are very promising for this type of measurement because of the possibility to sense hard to reach areas, without exposing the operator to risks. In this article, we present a coordinated swarm of UAVs equipped with gas sensors for industrial air pollution monitoring. The UAVs are coordinated by a ground control station to control the total working volume. We developed a coverage algorithm that elaborates and assigns the paths to each drone controlled by the swarm manager during the mission. The swarm of drones was tested with a real gas leakage and on a simulator, correctly moving into the area and detecting the leakage.