BEACON Drone: A Smart Search Robot for Disaster Response

Overview

Natural disasters such as fires, floods, and industrial accidents create hazardous environments that can endanger both victims and first responders. The goal of this project was to develop and validate a dual subsystem environmental monitoring system designed for future use on a first responder drone. The system consisted of an air quality subsystem using MQ-2, MQ-7, and MQ-135 gas sensors, a thermal camera, and a GPS module, and a water quality subsystem using water level, conductivity, turbidity, and pH sensors. During this phase, all sensors were tested under controlled ground based conditions to evaluate their ability to detect environmental hazards. Air sensors were exposed to clean air, indoor air, controlled smoke, and elevated heat sources. Water sensors were tested using clean water, muddy water, salted water, acidic water, and simulated flood conditions. The air subsystem successfully detected hazardous gas levels and elevated temperatures, while the water subsystem accurately identified changes in turbidity, conductivity, pH, and water level. The results demonstrate that both subsystems reliably distinguish between normal and hazardous environmental conditions. These findings support the feasibility of integrating this monitoring system into a drone platform to assist first responders in assessing dangerous environments before human entry.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Environmental Engineering (Track 2) (Junior Division) · Entry J-12-11

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Environmental Engineering projects
• CSEF Environmental Engineering projects
• Every CSEF 2026 project