Powering UAV with Deep Q-Network for Air Quality Tracking

Tracking the source of air pollution plumes and monitoring the air quality during emergency events in real-time is crucial to support decision-makers in making an appropriate evacuation plan. Internet of Things (IoT) based air quality tracking and monitoring platforms have used stationary sensors around the environment. However, fixed IoT sensors may not be enough to monitor the air quality in a vast area during emergency situations. Therefore, many applications consider utilizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to monitor the air pollution plumes environment. However, finding an unhealthy location in a vast area requires a long navigation time. For time efficiency, we employ deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) to assist UAVs to find air pollution plumes in an equal-sized grid space. The proposed Deep Q-network (DQN) based UAV Pollution Tracking (DUPT) is utilized to guide the multi-navigation direction of the UAV to find the pollution plumes’ location in a vast area within a short duration of time. Indeed, we deployed a long short-term memory (LSTM) combined with Q-network to suggest a particular navigation pattern producing minimal time consumption. The proposed DUPT is evaluated and validated using an air pollution environment generated by a well-known Gaussian distribution and kriging interpolation. The evaluation and comparison results are carefully presented and analyzed. The experiment results show that our proposed DUPT solution can rapidly identify the unhealthy polluted area and spends around 28% of the total time of the existing solution.