Drone fleet for monitoring pollution plumes in emergencies – DRON-MAP

The DRON-MAP project focuses on the use of cooperative UAV networks for pollution plume monitoring in emergency situations (industrial accidents, natural disasters, deliberate terrorist releases, etc.). The deployment of a UAV network in these situations face different scientific and technical challenges such as taking into account the strong plume dynamics, the timely data analysis, the reliable communication and coordination between UAVs and the planning of optimal trajectories. The objective of DRON-MAP project is to address these challenges while proposing a new global and systemic approach. Based on reliable communications and coordination between drones, our approach will federate an instantaneous estimation and a prediction of the plume evolution with efficient anticipatory algorithms of optimal path planning. A network testbed of few communicating UAVs will be set up in order to assess real-world feasibility and performance at a small scale.