Water Sampling with UAVs

Sampling in watercourses is an activity that today isn’t easy, but very important. You need to bring a boat on bad forest roads and spend a lot of time on logistics. It is not only hard and time-consuming to perform, but also expensive. Sparv Embedded is part of a team to come up with a UAV-based solution to make these samplings easier, faster and cheaper. We use the flexible sensor system Sparvio and contribute our knowledge from working on UAV sensor solutions over the past few years. The pictures are from a demo performed on May 14th in Västervik, Sweden. At the demo, we flew a quadcopter over a lake, descending twice to allow the hanging payload to collect water samples at two different points. The samples can then be analyzed as usual in a lab.

In the next step, we will also directly measure temperature, pH, conductivity and most importantly oxygen levels. The data will be visible in real-time to the operator, allowing on-the-spot exploration of variations in water quality. This would be useful to map plumes of emissions, for example in case of chemical spills. Where a deviation is discovered, the drone could take a water sample for further analysis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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