Towards Drone-based Mapping of Volcanic Gases using Gas Tomography

Volcanoes emit large amounts of CO2, directly influencing human lives. Mapping volcanic gas emissions helps to forecast eruptions and understand the impact of volcanoes on climate and the environment. Drone-based gas sensing significantly reduces risks in volcanic monitoring but faces technical limitations when measuring gas, as rotor downwash disperses the gas plume before detection. Gas Tomography using remote gas sensing addresses this challenge. At the Salinelle dei Cappuccini mud volcanoes, we demonstrate that while drone-mounted in-situ sensors failed to detect CO2 emissions due to aerodynamic disturbance, open-path sensing successfully enabled remote gas distribution mapping. We present a novel model-based gas tomographic reconstruction approach that incorporates a Lagrangian model to compensate for wind-induced advection. The resulting gas distribution maps align with manually collected in-situ measurements, confirming that model-based gas tomography effectively overcomes downwash limitations and enables accurate mapping of volcanic emissions.

Visual Cooperative Drone Tracking for Open-Path Gas Measurements

Open-path Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Spectroscopy offers an effective method for measuring, mapping, and monitoring gas concentrations, such as leaking CO2 or methane. Compared to spatial sampling of gas distributions using in-situ sensors, open-path sensors in combination with gas tomography algorithms can cover large outdoor environments faster in a non-invasive way. However, the requirement of a dedicated reflection surface for the open-path laser makes automating the spatial sampling process challenging. This publication presents a robotic system for collecting open-path measurements, making use of a sensor mounted on a ground-based pan-tilt unit and a small drone carrying a reflector. By means of a zoom camera, the ground unit visually tracks red LED markers mounted on the drone and aligns the sensor's laser beam with the reflector. Incorporating GNSS position information provided by the drone's flight controller further improves the tracking approach. Outdoor experiments validated the system's performance, demonstrating successful autonomous tracking and valid CO2 measurements at distances up to 60 meters. Furthermore, the system successfully measured a CO2 plume without interference from the drone's propulsion system, demonstrating its superiority compared to flying in-situ sensors.

Collecting Human Motion Data in Large and Occlusion-Prone Environments using Ultra-Wideband Localization

With robots increasingly integrating into human environments, understanding and predicting human motion is essential for safe and efficient interactions. Modern human motion and activity prediction approaches require high quality and quantity of data for training and evaluation, usually collected from motion capture systems, onboard or stationary sensors. Setting up these systems is challenging due to the intricate setup of hardware components, extensive calibration procedures, occlusions, and substantial costs. These constraints make deploying such systems in new and large environments difficult and limit their usability for in-the-wild measurements. In this paper we investigate the possibility to apply the novel Ultra-Wideband (UWB) localization technology as a scalable alternative for human motion capture in crowded and occlusion-prone environments. We include additional sensing modalities such as eye-tracking, onboard robot LiDAR and radar sensors, and record motion capture data as ground truth for evaluation and comparison. The environment imitates a museum setup, with up to four active participants navigating toward random goals in a natural way, and offers more than 130 minutes of multi-modal data. Our investigation provides a step toward scalable and accurate motion data collection beyond vision-based systems, laying a foundation for evaluating sensing modalities like UWB in larger and complex environments like warehouses, airports, or convention centers.