Self-powered wireless sensor nodes for monitoring radioactivity in contaminated areas using unmanned aerial vehicles

A self-sustainable wireless sensor node for the monitoring radiation in contaminated and poorly accessible areas is presented. The node is designed to work in collaboration with an unmanned aerial vehicle used for two essential mission steps: air-deploying the wireless sensor nodes at suitable locations and acquiring data logs via ultra-low power, short-range radio communication in fly-by mode, after a wake-up routine. The system allows for the use of off-the-shelf components for defining mission, drop-zone and trajectory, for compressing data, and for communication management. The node is equipped with a low-power nuclear radiation sensor and it was designed and implemented with self-sustainability in mind as it will be deployed in hazardous, inaccessible areas. To this end, the proposed node uses a combination of complementary techniques: a low-power microcontroller with non-volatile memory, energy harvesting, adaptive power management and duty cycling, and a nano-watt wake-up radio. Experimental results show the power consumption efficiency of the solution, which achieves 70uW in sleep mode and 500uW in active mode. Finally, simulations based on actual field measurements confirm the solution's self-sustainability and illustrate the impact of different sampling rates and that of the wake-up radio.