SWATER: Solid waste and water quality monitoring system using smart unmanned aerial vehicle

https://doi.org/10.70228/CBJ2024058

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ABSTRACT

Water is the essence of life, playing a crucial role in the earth's environmental cycle. Its value extends well beyond human consumption, encompassing a broad array of ecological services marine ecosystems provide. Unfortunately, the quality of Philippine waters has declined as industrial and human activities and population growth have increased. This brings about the need to monitor the quality of these bodies of water and their contamination by solid waste. Despite efforts to address these problems, technological limitations and inaccessibility in some areas have hindered effective monitoring and maintenance of water resources. This study developed an efficient system as part of the preservation measures for key bodies of water. The system includes an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a camera to monitor solid waste and collect water samples and an offshore water quality monitoring device installed with three sensors to analyze the collected water samples' turbidity, pH level, and temperature. The water quality results showed minimal percentage errors compared to the manual methods of checking the three parameters, with deviations of 8.15% for turbidity, 1.622% for pH level, and 4.076% for temperature. The system successfully identified visible garbage floating on water surfaces, such as plastic bottles, plastic, metal, and paper.  Furthermore, the system effectively communicated with the web server, allowing users to access real-time sensor readings and drone-captured images through a website. Future studies could further enhance this system by upgrading the motor capacity in order to collect more water samples in a single deployment, upgrading the water collector to a peristaltic pump, using higher-capacity batteries to extend flight time, increasing the camera's resolution and number of sensors to test additional water quality parameters like dissolved oxygen and salinity, and finally, improving the transmission media.

Keywords: drone, turbidity, pH level, captured images, web server