Master Thesis Student in Electrical Engineering/Physics/Information Technology (w/m/d)

Rotary UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are suitable platforms for monitoring airborne trace substances and gas concentrations. One popular type of sensor technology, Metal Oxide (MOX) Sensors, are well-suited due to their extremely compact and light form factor. However, their long response times and sensor drifts pose additional challenges to their use. In this master thesis, we will investigate to what extent we can use this and other sensor technology in real-life applications – gas source localization, where the goal is to see where the source of gas are based on measurements we take.

This topic will feature both a hardware and software component. On the hardware side, we will set up a UAV sensing platform with the appropriate trace gas sensors, which we can use in sensing experiments. Regarding software, we will look into possible ways we can improve the data quality from these sensors. Apart from signal processing techniques, we will look into different sensor models we can apply and assess their effectiveness when used numerically in gas source localization problems. We will design experiments with the sensors attached to drones to systematically investigate what limitations the sensing platform places on the information we obtain on gas concentrations and ultimately our location estimate.