https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202022506005
Radioactive Hot-spot Detection Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Surveillance
Instituto Superior Técnico
* avale@ipfn.tecnico.ulisboa.pt
Y. Brouwer is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal (email: yoeri.brouwer@ipfn.tecnico.ulisboa.pt)
A. Vale, B. Gonçalves and H. Fernandes are with the Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal.
D. Macedo is with the Department of Physics, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal.
Published online: 20 January 2020
This work proposes a solution to identify the number of sources of radiation, as well as their respective intensities and locations based on data acquired by Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and affordable radiological sensors, such as Geiger-M¨uller counters (GMC). An optimization algorithm is required to minimize the estimation error in terms of location, intensity and number of sources of radiation given all the intensity measurements acquired in different locations, taking into account the sensors’ models, background radiation intensity values and noise. Experimental results were achieved in a laboratory with controlled sources of radiation. The solution was also tested with real data gathered by a GMC connected to a mobile phone with a software application developed by the authors to synchronize the sensor readings with GPS data. The sensor and the mobile phone are attached to a quadcopter flying over the scenario with sources of radiation.
Key words: UAV / Radioactive Source / Radioactivity / Hotspot-Detection / Collimator
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
