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theses

With the development and rising popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), numerous applications continue to be devised. In a little touched niche, the project at hand sought to address the challenges with present day water quality monitoring procedures by replacing human involvement with the implementation of a remote platform. Specifically, the pro-posed solution was the use of a multi-medium octo-rotor capable of performing aerial and aquatic missions while retrieving salient hydro data. With said goal, the project offered a comprehensive discussion on the development of the proposed vehicle; its performance and viability. Tests conducted in both controlled pool water and rugged outdoor environments demonstrated key performance characteristics. While fresh water experiments required little concern, high salinity environments required durable waterproofing methods. With revisions, testing proved all electronics and enclosures watertight up to at least 17ft. With regard to vehicle performance, tests showed the vehicle capable of conducting repeatable seamless transitions in as little as 2 seconds. Finally, experiments were conducted evaluating the abilities of the platform to retrieve turbidity, dissolved oxygen, and conductivity data. Turbidity vehicle experiments showed an average measurement difference of only 0.0759 NTU when compared to hand held sensor readings. Dissolved oxygen data retrieved remotely and manually closely corroborated producing measurements by varying only as much as 4.79% air saturation. Combining multi-plane experiments, three dimensional water constructs were developed. In these experiments, precision uncertainty was as low as +/- 0.053 mg/L and+/- 35.18 micro-Siemens/cm. As a viable water data retrieval platform, experimental applications are being explored. In continued experiments, the multi-rotor platform will conduct water monitoring missions with a Blue Robotics ROV. In an effort to automate and stream-line water data acquisition methods, the heterogeneous vehicle pair is projected to operate in conjunction to complete a common task.

ETD_10811

M.S.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-sy8j-s935

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.