DAWSSM: A plug-and-play Drone Assisted Water Sampling and Sensing Module

Increasing water pollution necessitates frequent monitoring of water bodies, which is quite time-consuming and costly when done manually, especially for remote locations. Multi-rotor drones can be used for collecting water samples and transporting them to the laboratory for testing, since they are convenient for carrying small payloads and offer increased accessibility compared to aquatic vehicles. Most of the solutions proposed so far have focused on designing a specialized drone for this purpose, which makes the solution extremely difficult to replicate and use. In this paper, we abstract the sampling and water quality testing functionalities to a specialized module which can be attached to any drone. The attachment has its own power supply and does not consume power from the carrier drone. The practicality of the proposed approach is validated by performing a flight mission, including sample collection and water quality analysis using on board sensors. Temperature, pH and electrical conductivity values sensed from the water samples collected using DAWSSM and by manual collection are compared and found to have no difference. This demonstrates the efficacy of DAWSSM as a substitute for the conventional process.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a solution to abstract sampling and water quality testing functionalities to a specialized module that can be attached to any drone, and validates the practicality of the method. The performance in sample collection and water quality analysis during a flight mission demonstrates that DAWSSM can substitute the conventional process effectively.