NEWS RELEASE

Editor’s note: Links to video and high-resolution images for download appear at the end of this release.

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Mike Williams
713-348-6728
mikewilliams@rice.edu

Gas-sensing drones draw NSF backing

Rice U. engineers develop flying sensors that coordinate to warn communities of pollutants

HOUSTON – (Aug. 27, 2018) – Rice University researchers, in a collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine and Houston nonprofit Technology For All (TFA), are developing a fleet of autonomous aerial drones that coordinate with each other to detect, track and model the environment and let neighborhoods know of airborne perils that can be especially hazardous following extreme weather events.

Rice University postdoctoral researcher Riccardo Petrolo holds an autonomous drone set up to find and model dangerous pollutants. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Rice electrical and computer engineer Edward Knightly and his collaborators have won a National Science Foundation grant for $1.5 million to enable ASTRO, an aerial system to gather real-time, high-resolution data about volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the atmosphere by way of leaks, explosions or other accidents.

Early prototypes of the networked drones were demonstrated by Rice students who developed software protocols as their capstone design project at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen earlier this year. That project won the award for best gaming, creative, robotics or innovative technology award at the annual George R. Brown Engineering Design Showcase.

The new grant will allow the project team to not only continue to develop next-generation wireless and sensing technologies but to eventually deploy them in vulnerable locations.

“Now, if there’s a chemical leak, people may not learn about it for a couple of days, but our system can inform them immediately through their mobile phones,” said Riccardo Petrolo, a postdoctoral researcher in Knightly’s lab. “We are also concerned about the dangers first responders might face during extreme events like Hurricane Harvey. We want them to know where the edge of a plume is located so they know where it’s safe to breathe and where to set evacuation boundaries.”

Petrolo adjusts a gas-sensing drone in a Rice laboratory. Rice researchers, with National Science Foundation backing, are developing a system that will autonomously sense atmospheric conditions and warn neighborhoods when pollutants are present. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

When properly rigged, multiple ASTRO drones will assemble a three-dimensional record of aerial pollution using advanced modeling techniques developed by Rice environmental engineering professor Rob Griffin. The researchers hope to deploy ASTRO for testing in a neighborhood near the Houston Ship Channel, home to industrial processing plants and chemical refineries. Cliff Dacso, a professor of molecular and cell biology at Baylor, will guide the team’s analysis to focus on VOC signatures that are most detrimental to human health.

That community, on Houston’s east side, is already being served by Rice engineers who worked with TFA to deploy a sophisticated Wi-Fi network in 2011. Together with Will Reed, TFA president and project team member, the researchers would like to capitalize on that connection so drones can serve information about air quality to residents of the neighborhood in real time.

The team has already developed a prototype ASTRO mobile app to alert community residents to hazardous VOC concentrations.

ASTRO’s unique abilities will allow the system to work without intervention from a person or a ground controller. Yingyan Lin, a Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering, is designing custom machine-learning methods for the project. “We might need someone in a car to pick them up, or they might have a base station on the ground, but day to day, they should be able to take off, track plumes and send that information back through the internet,” Petrolo said.

Drones will have on-board sensors and transmitters that coordinate among themselves to find and track the plumes. Petrolo said Rice engineering colleagues led by laser pioneer and emeritus professor Frank Tittel are working to shrink the size of the sensors.

Petrolo said ASTRO’s capabilities will stretch beyond gas sensing. “The platform is fully agnostic,” he said. “There’s no reason it can’t support cameras and other wireless sensors to, for instance, find someone in an emergency response situation.”

Petrolo said the technology will allow the use of as few or as many drones as necessary to perform a task.

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Read about the award here: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1801865&HistoricalAwards=false

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Rice Networks Group (Knightly lab): http://networks.rice.edu

ASTRO website: http://astro.rice.edu

Rice Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: https://eceweb.rice.edu

George R. Brown School of Engineering: https://engineering.rice.edu

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqxSfD6syAQ

A video produced in April described the award-winning work by Rice University students to create software for an autonomous drone platform. The technology has won backing by the National Science Foundation for further development. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)

Images for download:

http://news.rice.edu/files/2018/08/0827_DRONE-1-web-1hpu7qr.jpg

Rice University postdoctoral researcher Riccardo Petrolo adjusts a drone in preparation for testing. Petrolo is part of a National Science Foundation-funded project to continue development of autonomous drones that coordinate to find and model dangerous pollutants. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/files/2018/08/0827_DRONE-4-web-11r7iti.jpg

Postdoctoral researcher Riccardo Petrolo adjusts a gas-sensing drone in a Rice University laboratory. Rice researchers, with National Science Foundation backing, are developing a system that will autonomously sense atmospheric conditions and warn neighborhoods when pollutants are present. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/files/2018/08/0827_DRONE-5-web-161205o.jpg

Rice University postdoctoral researcher Riccardo Petrolo shows one of several autonomous aerial drones being prepared to monitor for pollutants. The National Science Foundation awarded a grant to the Rice lab of electrical and computer engineer Edward Knightly to develop the platform. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,970 undergraduates and 2,934 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.