Titouan Verdu gave a presentation at the 2021’s edition of the Sharc event, that took place on july 9th 2021. You can find below the abstract. The PDF of the slides is available via Slideshare.

Abstract

The ALPAGA project proposes the construction of an AeriaL Platform for sampling Atmospheric Gases and Aerosols. It involves a drone-based solution to make 3 dimensional maps of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and aerosol particles. Such atmospheric species have well-documented impacts on both health, leading to millions of premature deaths yearly, and climate, nowadays estimated to compensate (at least for aerosols) some of the greenhouse gas effect.

We present the current status of the architecture we have been developing as part of the ALPAGA project. The solution under development involves both hardware and software parts, built on top of a commercial DJI M600 Pro hexarotor drone. On the hardware side we are building a nacelle that will store air samples in containers carried by the drone. Using a Raspberry-pi running ROS, we remotely control a vacuum suction pump to suck air into inert teflon bags. We discuss challenges we have faced so far, solutions we have implemented, and how we plan to automate map construction by geolocalizing samples collected at different locations.