Project Description

Pollution is a threat to human health. The diffusion of polluting agents is a leading cause of environmental pollution of all key spheres including the hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere, among others. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) states "Soil pollution affects the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe". The constrast to the pollution diffusion is efficient in the presence of instruments to measure ite level and to monitor its progress. The traditional measurement of soil pollution is a time-consuming operation. It requires sampling of the soil, accurate sample conservation, and shipment to a laboratory. Due to the chemical complexities of the samples, a pretreatment step is required before the analytical determination of pollutants, and a sequence of procedures are implemented. Despite its complexity, measurement of the soil pollutant is a diffuse and important necessity. In light of this, there is an urgent need to design and develop strategic and original both sensors and measuring techniques with higher efficacy and precision to detect a broader spectrum of numerous contaminants, as well as measurement and positioning techniques able to correctly locate the sampling point in a 3D space immersed in the soil. The design and the realization of the above-described sensors and measurement techniques will enable the possibility of developing an autonomous vehicle (drilling robot for example) equipped with a measurement and location system allowing the automatic execution of measurements. This possibility can support the real-time and in-process monitoring of the generation and release of environmental pollutants to restrain the level of contamination itself and program in a short time the personalized recovery strategy. Measuring the position of an autonomous vehicle into the underground requires the development of new localization techniques since the traditional ones don't work properly. The capability to combine measurement and positioning enables the construction of pollution maps. The measurements of pollutants also provide indications for more detailed and more targeted subsequent laboratory analysis operations. Moreover, the development of cost-effective techniques both for measurement and positioning favors the diffusion of instrumentations to increase the operation of quantification of environmental damage, thus satisfying the emergency needs of the near future. Furthermore, the project has a much wider value than that of analyzing and detecting polluted areas. Subsurface scanning is essential for several other application domains including construction, inspection, mine detection, and others. In this scope, recently, several technological breakthroughs took place in the field of subsurface scanning machinery.