POLLINS Automated Pollution Inspection Scanning System for Soil using a robotic vehicle (www.pollins.eu)
Country: EU Projects
Start Date:           Duration: 36 months         Project Type: RTD
Contract Number: Grant agreement no.: 606079
Organisation Type:  Consultancy, contractor or other service provider
Topics: 
Brownfields
Contaminated land-->Contaminated land overview
Diffuse pollution-->Diffuse pollution overview
Soil-->Soil Overview
Project objectives: 
Project's technical objectives  
•Development of a rolling High Power Ultrasound (HPU) sensor, able to identify discontinuities in soil homogeneity  
•Design of semi-autonomous remote controlled vehicle which will incorporate a DGPS system, accelerometer and absolute orientation sensors. The vehicle 
must have impact and weather resistant chassis and will be able to move on irregular soils.   
•Design of an array of SAW sensors that will be able to detect organic solvents and NAPLs pollution   
•Software to process and model the data obtained, through data cross correlation and fusion, offering as output a 3D mapping of soil pollution in the observed 
area.  
•Development of a signal processing toolbox incorporated in a man-machine interface, that will provide a comprehensive set of reference-standard algorithms 
and graphical tools for image processing, analysis, visualization, and algorithm development, such as image enhancement, image deblurring, noise reduction, 
spatial transformations and image registration.  
•Development of optical fibre chemical sensors which will be able to measure humidity, pH of the soil and the concentrations of heavy metal pollutants in 
real time.
Project Summary: 
Currently, the detection of soil pollution is done by manual surveys which are inefficient, unreliable, time consuming and very expensive. The need of a better 
and low-cost technical approach, that would be able to assess contaminated areas before programing the required remediation actions, has become more intense 
due to public awareness for the environment. This project aims to develop a semi-autonomous, remotely controlled robotic system that will deploy three novel 
(and a modified existing) sensors for the assessment of soil quality and site characterization. The large contaminated sites will be covered by 100%, presented 
by fine scale 3D maps of contaminant levels and giving quality and quantity data for the pollutants (heavy metals, organic solvents, NAPLS) without the need 
of human intervention. Considering that the personnel is endangered by the toxic contaminants, this is very important.  
  
  
Four different types of sensors (HPU, GPR, chemical sensors and SAW) will be integrated to detect efficiently the contaminants in the surface and underground 
(up to 10 meters). Data collected from the sensors will be fused, correlated and optimized to provide GPS linked ground 3D images of contaminant distribution. 
Thus ground property images from different sensors can be combined to produce composite images that can be used also later to during the treatment of soil contamination. 
Advanced signal processing techniques will be used to obtain the correct interpretation of the data acquired by the sensors and image processing will ameliorate 
the fused images. The automated inspection soil contamination system will benefit the SMEs involved in NDT, robotics and contamination detection.
Achieved Objectives:
Product Descriptions:
Additional Information:
Project Resources:
Weblink:
http://www.pollins.eu/
Funding Programme(s): 
EC FP7: Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.
Link to Organisations:

OIKON - Ltd. Institute for Applied Ecology
Submitted by: Mr Zdravko Spiric  Who does what?  02/07/2015 21:06:00