Autonomous UAV Gas Pollution Source Locating Method Based on Concentration Diffusion Gradient

Gas pollution control is an urgent issue in developing countries, which has become a global concern. In this paper, considering the deficiencies in the illegal gas emission supervisory system, and the difficulties for the law enforcement officers to find and take the evidence of illegal emissions or realize the all-time supervision, a method to automatically locate the source of illegal gas emissions using the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is proposed. First, we investigated the gas diffusion by Gaussian plume model. Then we used this model to establish the weighted centroid locating method based on concentration diffusion gradient and designed the route of the UAV to arrive at the gas pollution source automatically. Finally, we applied this algorithm on a F450-pixhack4 UAV and conducted the experiment to verify the feasibility of this method, the experiment results show that themaximum error of the located position is about 6min a 1000m(2) searching area.