Development of a Multirotor-Based System for Air
Quality Monitoring
Hussein Mazeh Majd Saied
Lebanese University, Faculty of Lebanese University, Faculty of
Engineering, Research Center in Engineering, Research Center in
Engineering, Lebanon. Engineering, Lebanon.
Email: engineer.hmam@hotmail.com Email: majd.elsaied@hotmail.com
Abstract— Air quality monitoring has been traditionally
conducted using ground-based systems that present multiple
disadvantages in terms of support infrastructures, maintenance
and power consumption. Recently, researchers have proposed the
use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) equipped with sensors for
air data monitoring. However, UAV operation lacks of reliability
to be used in populated area. In this paper, we propose to use an
hexarotor UAV armed with Fault Tolerant Control (FTC)
strategies to measure and detect air quality for air data collection
in urban environments.
Keywords—Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Air pollution, Hexarotor
UAV, Fault Tolerant Control.
I. INTRODUCTION
Air pollution is considered one of the most serious
environmental problems facing our civilization today. It has a
long evolutionary history with interesting transitions in line with
economic, technological and political changes and
developments. It can be defined as the emission of harmful
substances into the atmosphere. This broad definition therefore
covers a number of pollutants, including: Carbon monoxide
(CO), Carbon dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), …
Environmental data collection is probably one of the most
difficult tasks associated with environmental field studies. The
majority of methods used to monitor air pollution in large cities
rely on fixed monitoring stations. However, technical and
procedural limitations associated with those traditional fixed-site
stations are well-known [1]. First, they can provide accurate data
only for only a limited area. Other disadvantages are related to
the need for other support infrastructures such as secure
enclosures and power supplies, and the need for maintenance
and continuous power consumption. Taking the aforementioned
issues into consideration, researchers have proposed the use of
unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs equipped with sensors to
provide the service of air pollution monitoring. In fact, the
reduced size, weight and power needs of these flying robots, as
well as the reduced cost of the platforms and instrumentation,
make them particularly suitable for this operation.
ISBN: 978-1-5386-2742-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
Clovis Francis
Lebanese University, Faculty of
Engineering, Research Center in
Engineering, Lebanon.
Email: cfrancis@ul.edu.lb
UAVs have been used by researchers and commercial
organizations to detect atmospheric gases and aerosols, where
they were able to reach remote areas and explore large regions.
The application of UAVs in air data collection includes wind
vector measurements, atmospheric aerosols data collection,
greenhouse gases and other gaseous pollutants measurements. It
includes also volcano emission, typhoons and arctic
environment data collection [2]. UAVs can also be used for
regular patrols around industrial areas and metal ore sites. In
2005, Watai et al. [3] proposed an infrared sensing system to
monitor the concentrations of atmospheric CO2 on a small UAV
and designed a precise gas sensor system (accuracy of ± 0.26
ppm). The system performed several flight tests with one hour
flight autonomy and a payload of 3.5 kg. The authors in [4] and
[5] described an integrated solar powered remote fixed wing
UAV and wireless sensor network (WSN) gas sensing system.
The system includes a gaz sensing system for concentrations of
CH4 and CO2 using metal oxide (MOX) and infrared sensors,
and a new method of encapsulating solar cells to power the
UAVs as well as a data management platform for storage,
analysis and information sharing with operators and external
users. Chwaleba et al. [6] reviewed optical sensors that can be
mounted on a UAV for air pollution monitoring, classifying
Light Detecting and Ranging (LIDAR) sensors as the best
optical devices to be used as a payload for air quality
monitoring. An extensive literature review on the use of small
UAVs for air quality measurements was presented in [2] with
present applications and future prospectives. Different types of
UAVs were used: fixed-wing UAVs and rotary-wing UAVs.
Rotary-wing UAVs, such as helicopters and multirotors
(quadrotors, hexarotors or octorotors), generally have a lower
operating speed, but allow discontinuous paths, such as
hovering, for close proximity inspection. In this paper, we
propose to mount air quality sensors (CO, CO2, CH4) with a
camera and an Arduino for data processing and a LCD for
monitoring and results displaying on a hexarotor UAV. The
hexarotor is equipped with fault tolerance algorithms to be able
to fly over populated areas to collect air data.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In section
II, a general overview about the gas sensors and their principle
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of operation is presented. Section III presents the overall system
structure including the hexarotor and the used sensors. Section
IV presents the Fault Tolerant Control Strategy adopted.
Experimental results are presented in section V. The paper ends
with conclusions and perspectives in section VI.
II. GAS SENSORS
A gas sensor is an equipment that detects the presence of gases
in an area and measures their concentration. Due to their ability
to detect the leakage of gases and some emissions, gas sensors
have been considered as an important element of the safety
systems, control systems, environment saving systems, and
biomedical systems.
Various kinds of gas sensors exist. They are classified
according to their operation mechanism such as:
semiconductors, oxidation, catalytic, photoionization, infrared,
etc. They are also packaged into two main forms, either portable
devices or fixed gas sensors. Portable sensors are normally used
to monitor the surrounding atmosphere and the breathing zone
of the user. They are often hand-held or attached to a belt. Fixed
type gas sensors, used for detection of one or more gas types, are
generally mounted in large facilities and installed near the
process area of a plant or control room, or an area to be protected.
Metal oxide semiconductor gas sensors are used in a wide
variety of industries. They present several advantages when
compared to other sensing technologies: they are relatively
inexpensive, robust, lightweight, durable and have a high
material sensitivity and a quick response time [7].
The principle of operation of semiconductor gas sensors is as
follows: a gas comes into contact with a metal oxide surface and
subsequently undergoes oxidation or reduction [8]. The
absorption or desorption of the gas on the metal oxide results in
the shifting of either the conductivity or resistivity from a
baseline value. This change, measured with electronic circuitry,
has usually a linear and proportional relationship with gas
concentration. This leads to the establishment of a simple
calibration equation between resistivity/conductivity change and
gas concentration.
An example of a calibration equation for a change in
resistivity is given by [7] and [9] for carbon monoxide:
𝑅/𝑅𝑜 = 1 + 𝐴[𝐶𝑂] (1)
where R is the resistance following contact with a gas, Ro is
the baseline resistance, A is a constant, and CO is carbon
monoxide.
III. SYSTEM STRUCTURE OVERVIEW
In this paper we aim to develop a UAV-based system for air
pollution and fire detection. This system is called NatSave
which stands for Nature Save and shown in Fig. 1. NatSave is
equipped with the adequate sensors for air quality data
collection and analysis: concentrations of air pollutants, air
temperature, atmospheric pressure and wind directions and
speeds. This will allow scientists to better understand the
pollution diffusion not only near ground, but also near pollution
sources at medium altitude.
ISBN: 978-1-5386-2742-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
Fig. 1. NatSave system mouted to multirotor UAV.
The system is equipped with four semiconductor gas sensors:
 Methane gas sensor CH4 (MQ-4).
 Carbon Monoxide gas sensor CO (MQ-7).
 Carbon Dioxide gas sensor CO2 (MG811).
 Air Quality Control sensor (MQ135).
Also it is equipped with a temperature sensor for measuring
the ambient temperature for monitoring and system
compensation.
These sensors are characterized by analog voltage output
connected to the ADC of an Arduino processor. Arduino
processor communicates with the brain of the UAV via a serial
communication link using MAVLink protocol. MAVLink is a
very lightweight, header-only message marshalling library for
micro air vehicles / drones, more information concerning this
protocol can be found in [10] Position and altitude are extracted
from these data, also atmospheric pressure is extracted. Once the
data of the sensors are digitized, they are bounded with the
position and altitude to form a sample stamp of the gases in
function of position and altitude. This sample is saved to an SD
card storage device.
Adding surveillance system formed from camera and On Screen
Display (OSD), permits binding position and gases samples
with pictures and videos while scanning polluted areas and
nature. In addition, live video stream is transmitted to ground
station using 5.8 Ghz 600 mW video transmitter in order to
visualize the upper vision with the needed data in order to detect
any abnormality like fire, smoke, fuel leakage, etc. The used
parts and devices were chosen carefully taking into
consideration minimizing power consumption for saving more
operation time, minimizing the overall mass for less energy
consumption, and applying the appropriate positioning of
sensors and other devices such as the needed filters for better
measurement and performance. Block diagram of NatSave
system is shown in Fig. 2, in addition Fig. 3 shows an overall
demonstration of the system.
This system adds the opportunity to scientists for reaching
any area and taking samples from air without any contact with
risk, also it permits braking the constraint being attached to on
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ground studies and researches by flying in different modes and transportation system. However, their employment is subject to
altitudes. various operational and technical limitation. UAVs must
necessarily meet flight terms and obey with air traffic rules like
Low- FPV Camera
manned aircrafts. This requires them to warranty a certain level
ADC of technical reliability and crash resistance to assure security on
CO2 Pass
sensor Filter the ground, and a satisfying reliability from an attitude point of
view to ensure the safety of other aircrafts in flight. Thus, UAVs
CO Serial 1 5.8 Ghz video should be armed with fault-tolerant control algorithms eligible
sensor OSD
transmitter of monitoring the vehicle health and dealing with several
CH4
actions when needed. Taking into consideration all possible
SPI faults that may take place during the flight with the capability
sensor SD Card
of their detection and diagnosis is the main motivation for fault-
A.Q. tolerant flight control systems [11], [12].
sensor Serial 2 UAV
Autopilot & In the event of a motor failure in the hexarotor, the purpose of
GPS
Temperature Arduino a reconfigurable control system is to redistribute the control
sensor Processor effort among the remaining healthy motors such that satisfactory
Fig. 2. Block diagram of NatSave system.
performances are retained. An offline nonlinear constrained
optimization approach is used [12], where the solutions to a
NatSave system has the following technical characteristics: predefined set of failures are calculated offline to drive the
motors depending on the fault situation. With prior knowledge
 Dimension: 20x15x6 cm. of the failure assumed, a look-up table that determines the mixer
 Total weight: 700 gr. gains is pre-calculated in such a way to meet the requirements of
 Supply voltage: 8 ~ 18 VDc. reconfiguration and be easily implemented and tested in the
 Consumed current: 300 mA. validation and verification process required before the flight.
 Continuous operation time: 1 hr. The hexarotor is equipped with six actuators
 Maximum covered distance: 2 km away from ground (motors/propellers). The controller generates a virtual control
station. t
command v  u f       , that should be
distributed among the healthy actuators.
The problem is stated as:
Bu (t )  v (t )
(2)
umin  u  umax
u  12 22 32 42 52 62  and B is the control
matrix. For realizing stability while hovering, it necessary to
guarantee zero moments around the three axes:
u f  mg ,    0,    0,   0.
Thus, the formulation of the problem becomes as follows: The
control allocation aims to detect the input u that corresponds to
the motors inputs given that 𝑣 is the vector given above. The
constrained optimization problem is solved as follows:
1
min u T u
u 2
(3)
u  u  umax
such that :{ min
Bu  v
The vector umax is determined according to each fault.
Fig. 3. Over all system demonstration.
V. EXPERIMENTS
This section makes a close vision on the hardware used in the
experiments. It also shows the results of outdoor experiments
IV. FAULT TOLERANT STRATEGY concerning the performance of NatSave system combined with
To facilitate the operations of UAVs in air quality monitoring UAV.
applications, they should be integrated into the air

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A. Experimental platform
An outdoor test environment has been created to test the
behavior and performance of mobile gas sensors mounted to a
real hexarotor UAV (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4. Overview of the test environment.
The setup consists of the following components which will be
described in detail in the following sections:
 Hexarotor platform.
 Flight controller.
 GPS.
 RC Transmitter/Receiver.
 Ground station application.
The used multirotor platform is a Tarot hexacopter. The
rotors are distributed on a circle around the center of gravity to
form a PPNNPN rotor arrangement. The motors are phantom2
Dji 960kv controlled using Dji 40 Amp ESC. To insure the
connection with ground station a 433 MHz transceiver is also
mounted.
The hexarotor frame is mounted with Pixhawk flight
controller. This modem is an open source robust autopilot
controller based on a 32 bit ARM CPU connected to an Inertial
Measurement Unit (IMU) and Barometric Altimeter, and
equipped with needed digital communication peripherals. The
property of open source permits the developer to modify the
C++ code in order to add the algorithms needed depending on
the ArduPilot professional producer of the compatible codes
and firmware [13]. In order to safely fly this UAV over urban
aeras for air data collection, the PPNNPN configuration was
adopted and the hexarotor was equipped with fault tolerant
control architectures to recover the UAV after the occurrence of
one or multiple actuators failures.
In order to determine the position of the hexarotor, a GPS is
connected with the Pixhawk through serial port and managed
by the mounted CPU. The data sent from the GPS cooperates
with the IMU raw data and the Barometer using an Extended
Kalman Filter (EKF) to form a high rate positioning system and
an Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS). The GPS used
is a low cost Ublox M8N.
In addition to that, a ground station application permits
ISBN: 978-1-5386-2742-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
monitoring the position and the characteristics of the hexarotor
during its mission. These data are logged and projected on the
map of the driving PC. The driving PC is connected to a
transceiver for receiving telemetry data from the hexarotor and
sending commands for it.
B. Results
The experiments have been performed in to test and
demonstrate the following:
 Performance of mounted gas sensors in a mobile
system multirotor UAV during real flight.
 Performance of mounted gas sensors integrated
with other mounted devices (Fig. 5).
 Ability of a hexarotor UAV to handle the system
without affecting its maneuverability.
Two main experiments were performed. The first one is an
indoor laboratory experiment that aimed to test each branch of
the system alone. After that the system was tested after
integrating all parts together. In these tests our main focus was
oriented towards sensor performance and power consumption.
Fig. 5. NatSave system including gas sensors
integrated with other devices.
The second test is an outdoor real experiment at an altitude
of 3 meters above ground after mounting NatSave system to the
hexarotor tightly. The scanned area where the test was
performed is the football playground of Lebanese University
Campus, Rafik AlHariri. Ground and aboard videos can be
found at: https://youtu.be/kEYvYyUQRPY.
After tuning the hexarotor UAV, the appropriate
configurations were chosen and fixed to its autopilot also RF
and video connection between the vehicle and ground station
were tested.
A trajectory mission for the desired scanned area is uploaded
to the vehicle using ground station application depending on
some way points and coordinates. During the mission samples
of measured gases were logged and saved for future analysis.
These results are shown in Fig. 6 for CO2 gas, Fig. 7 CO gas,
Fig. 8 CH4 gas, and Fig 9 air quality. In these figures the two-
horizontal axis represent Lat and Lon coordinates for scanned
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area during mission, vertical axis represents concentration ratio
of measured gases with respect to position. This ratio is multiple
of 1000, which is the maximum concentration ratio. After
suitable gain calculations acceptable threshold ratios for
different gas sensors was addressed; for CO2 gas 550, and for
other gases between 75 and 150. Any measurement below this
threshold shows a healthy scanned area with respect to the
measured gas sample.
In addition, temperature samples for scanned area were
logged and shown in Fig. 10. Notice that during mission, the
hexarotor was stable and performed its mission successfully. Fig. 8. Concentration of CH4 gas with respect to scanned position.
To test the performance of the fault tolerant controller, two
motors failures were injected when the hexarotor was following
a trajectory to simulate a mission where the hexarotor is asked
to collect air data in a certain area. Figure 11 shows how the
hexarotor is capable of maintaining acceptable altitude and
trajectory after two motors failures. Videos on fault tolerance
can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr6h6Sr6CJk.

Fig. 9. Air Quality ratio with respect to scanned position.

Fig. 6. Concentration of CO2 gas with respect to scanned position.

Fig. 10 Temperature with respect to scanned position.

Fig. 7. Concentration of CO gas with respect to scanned position.

ISBN: 978-1-5386-2742-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 27


Figure 11: Altitude and Position of the hexarotor after two motors failures
VI. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents a UAV-fault tolerant based system for air
pollution monitoring and fire detection. It is equipped with the
adequate sensors for air quality data collection and analysis:
concentrations of air pollutants, air temperature, atmospheric
pressure and wind directions and speeds. The hexarotor UAV,
with redundant actuators, demonstrates high payload and fault
tolerance capabilities. However, this system presents good and
accurate results, some challenges need to be taken into
consideration in future works such as flight time and power
consumption optimization.
VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been partially funded with support from the
National Council for Scientific Research in Lebanon (CNRSL)
and the Lebanese University Research support program.
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