Autonomous cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms monitoring using multirotor UAS

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In this article, we present a framework to use an autonomous multirotor unmanned aerial system (UAS) for cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (CHABs) monitoring. The requirements of CHABS monitoring, and the factors are analysed. Formulae are developed to describe the relation between the image qualities and the UAS performance. Experiments are designed to investigate the influences of the flight parameters (the flight altitude, the flight speed and the shutter time of the camera) on the image resolution. CHABs detection experiments were carried out at Kingston, Canada. Experimental results show that the autonomous UAS is a promising enabling technology to contribute to a novel CHABs detection method.