Toward Blue Skies: City-Scale Air Pollution Monitoring Using UAVs

Dangers associated with poor air quality are driving deployments of air quality monitoring technology worldwide. Having a comprehensive understanding of the health effects of pollutants requires understanding both the distribution and dispersion of pollutants in the environment, but currently this information is highly difficult to capture. This article presents a vision for city-scale air pollution monitoring that uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to complement current ground and infrastructure-based measurements with a vertical profile of pollutants. We highlight the key requirements and research challenges, demonstrate the benefits UAVs bring through measurements from an industrial and a residential location, and establish a research roadmap for the path forward.