An Integrated System for Real-Time Water Monitoring Based on Low Cost Unmanned Surface Vehicles

This paper presents the development of an integrated system for the monitoring of aquatic ecosystems aiming at providing a set of tools to identify critical environmental scenarios and then adopt strategic decisions for the management of lakes, rivers or coastal areas. The whole monitoring infrastructure is centered on the realization of a low cost Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) to be employed for the collection of crucial parameters about water quality. The vehicle, calledWeMo (Water Environmental Mobile Observer) has been realized with low cost off-the-shelf components and is provided with a modular array of sensors to measure chemical and physical parameters as well as to perform bathymetry. It can be controlled either manually or automatically and it is also provided with LoRa Wide Range wireless connectivity enabling it to automatically store the collected data onto a cloud platform. Data analytics tools have also been introduced in order to develop a complete monitoring ecosystem covering all the tasks of data collection, storage and analysis.