Gas Sensing on Unmanned Vehicles: Challenges and Opportunities

Unmanned aerial vehicles are aggressively entering many fields of scientific research thanks to their versatility, relatively low cost and ease of customization. Among all the envisioned applications, environmental monitoring and disaster recovery are very interesting and promising. In this scenario, drones instrumented with environmental sensors are driven into contaminated or inaccessible areas to collect samples (air, water, soil, etc.) and to estimate their wholesomeness, before human intervention. Many challenges are still open in this field, from the design of a suitable artificial intelligence for autonomous driving to the maximization of energy autonomy. In this paper we focus on the interface between gas sensors and drone equipment, in particular we discuss the issue of minimizing the weight of the payload and the accuracy of the measurement, processing and streaming relevant data to the final users. A prototype gas-drone based on a micro drone platform has been realized and used to investigate challenges and to identify opportunities.