SDAS UAV is a Chinese UAV developed by Shandong Academy of Sciences (SDAS, 山东省科学院) specifically for pollution surveillance missions, and it has entered service with the local governmental environmental establishment, Shandong Environmental Protection Department (山东省环保厅) since June 2014.
Octocopter
The UAV developed by SDAS for environmental monitoring applications is an octocopter, and it is developed by the UAV project development team (无人机项目研发团队) of Shandong Computer Science Center (山东省计算中心) of SDAS, and the team is led by Dr. Liu Xiang (刘祥). The need for aerial pollution monitoring system was urgent because local businesses were not (and still are) not honest about the pollution control practice: although every local business is forced to install Continuous Emission Monitoring System (CEMS, 烟气连续监测系统), they could and often turn off the system when release smog or other pollutants, and even destroy data in order to lower the amount emission to meet the quota, by simply claiming the equipment had malfunctioned. It was very difficult to catch such illegal acts because every CEMS is on site and there was simply not enough manpower to monitor every system. An alternative would be monitor the pollution emission from air, where businesses could not tamper with monitoring system, hence the UAV for environmental monitoring was born. Since 2012, SDAS had joined forces with Australian National University (ANU) to develop an UAV for pollution monitoring, with ANU providing assistance to develop the onboard monitoring system, and Chinese are responsible for the aerial platform itself. The resulting UAV is an octocopter with a pair of skids as landing gear, and only requires three to five square meters to take-off and land, and capable of monitor pollutants of size as small as PM 2.5. Specification: