Towards SWARM: A Smart Water Monitoring System

Julian Kunze, Vincent Mayer, Lisa Thiergart, Saqib Javed, Patrick Scheppe, Tam Tran, Markus Haug, Mariana Avezum, Bernd Bruegge, Eugène C. Ezin

Abstract: We introduce our Smart Water Monitoring System (SWARM), an interconnected system centered around unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is designed to gather environmental data in hard-to-reach areas in order to facilitate water quality management for surrounding communities. We focus specifically on the village of Ganvié on Lake Nokoué in Africa. The lake suffers from severe pollution which poses a threat to the ecosystem in and around the lake. The SWARM system consists of multiple drones with different purposes, including water sampling and aerial data collection. It utilizes a fog architecture to combine the advantages of centralized computing and storage with those of local data processing. The fog architecture is key to address connection issues around Lake Nokoué. SWARM reduces the effort for researchers to effectively monitor and investigate water pollution issues by partially automating the process.