Authors:
Rishik Rodrigues, Lavisha Noronha, Sreeja Rajesh

Addresses:
Department of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Mangalore Institute of Technology and Engineering, Moodabidri, Mangaluru, Karnataka, India. Department of Information Science and Engineering, Mangalore Institute of Technology and Engineering, Moodabidri, Mangaluru, Karnataka, India.

Abstract:

Water pollution, a key global environmental issue, is especially critical in intensely contaminated water bodies such as river stretches, lakes, and estuaries, where continuous water-quality monitoring and remediation are impractical with current existing approaches. This paper presents AquaTrace, a multimodal, autonomous river basin water-quality monitoring, water-source localisation, and remediation platform based on a solar-powered Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV). The system proposes a control architecture based on a Raspberry Pi 5 and an ESP32 microcontroller, a six-stage water purification sequence, real-time water-quality measurement instrumentation, and a Pollution Gradient Ascent (PGA) navigation approach to localise pollution sources. A physical prototype is constructed to verify the platform design, including buoyancy, mobility, subsystem integration, and autonomous operation in an aquatic environment. To scale the platform for large-area operations, simulation studies are conducted using literature values for water-quality parameters from polluted water bodies, such as Lake Bellandur and the Ganga and Yamuna River stretches. The feasibility of large-scale water-quality analysis and remediation operations in complex contamination domains has been demonstrated through the simulation platform.

Keywords: Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV); Water Purification; Pollution Gradient Ascent (PGA); IoT Water Monitoring; Aquatic Environment; Global Environmental Issue; Autonomous Operation.

Received on: 16/09/2024, Revised on: 25/11/2024, Accepted on: 04/02/2025, Published on: 03/06/2026

DOI: 10.69888/FTSES.2026.000677

FMDB Transactions on Sustainable Energy Sequence, 2026 Vol. 4 No. 1, Pages: 32-50

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