UAV-Based Intelligent Environmental Monitoring of Pollutants in Highway Construction Zones

ORCID ID

Mehdi Rahmati https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9012-3079

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-17-2026

Publication Title

IEEE Journal on Miniaturization for Air and Space Systems (early access)

Abstract

Highway construction zones produce transient pollutant plumes in corridors where static stations are not present to capture pollutant concentrations. Existing uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) solutions address mobility but treat each measurement as equally trustworthy, ignoring sensor saturation, drift, motion-induced airflow distortion, and time stamp offsets that systematically corrupt decisions where monitoring matters most. This paper proposes an integrity-aware UAV sensing framework that couples an onboard epistemic state with a cloud-based multi-agent integrity synthesis layer. Each UAV maintains a local measurement window characterized by adequacy metrics, i.e., outlier, stability, gradient, and integrity flags, saturation, limit-of-detection, drift, motion, synchronization, and adaptively extends its sampling window when any violation is detected, so that revisit-constrained measurements remain self-certified. Validated window summaries are transmitted over a long-range LoRa link and fused in the cloud to drive a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) policy whose reward explicitly penalizes sampling actions tied to flagged windows. Field trials at two active Ohio Department of Transportation highway reconstruction sites in Akron, USA, demonstrate a 98% hotspot detection rate, 96% alignment with U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) thresholds, and faster convergence than independent, single-agent, greedy, and random-walk baselines, with on-board decisions completing within 50 ms.

DOI

10.1109/JMASS.2026.3724380

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