Autonomous water sampling and quality monitoring in remote locations: A novel approach using a remote-controlled boat

Water quality varies widely across the globe due to numerous sources of contamination. This disparity emphasizes the urgent need to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal 6, which aims to ensure universal access to clean water and sanitation. Traditional water monitoring approaches often come with high costs, limited time fidelity, and the absence of territorial dimensionality (often at fixed points). These approaches rely on either manual sampling or stationary buoy platforms, which are labour-intensive and cannot be easily accessed to retrieve water samples (for stationary systems). This paper presents an inexpensive, modified remote-controlled (RC) boat based water monitoring system that is open source, compact, robust, highly adaptable and capable of traversing various riverine environments to collect water and perform samples anywhere within the water body. The solution enhances data quality, facilitates laboratory microbiological investigation, and provides combined water quality data and water samples for comprehensive analysis. The platform comprises a remotely operated boat equipped with lab-grade sensors (pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, ORP, temperature) and a sonar depth sensor. It efficiently collects high-resolution spatio-temporal water-quality data with a high accuracy RTK-GPS system and allows eight separate water samples to be collected at different locations. The sensors were validated using lab-grade equipment, followed by successful field testing that confirmed their accuracy and reliability in real-world conditions.