The design and implementation of a surveillance and self-driven cleanup system for blue-green algae blooms on Lake Tai

Nowadays, the harmful blue-green algae blooms on lakes or streams threaten the daily life of millions of people in China. In this paper, we demonstrate the sensor network system we built on Lake Tai for the surveillance and cleanup of the algae blooms which is at work in Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province. We designed the sensor device and algorithm to monitor the algae bloom and estimate the bloom area. When the bloom area goes beyond the threshold, the salvaging boats are automatically dispatched to the scene to clean up the bloom for recycling utilization according to a mechanism in a scalable coordination fashion. The dispatching mechanism includes to consider the locations of salvaging boats, the number of available salvaging boats and the facility status in eight algae harvesting factories around the lake. The system also balances workloads of factories to achieve an overall high working efficiency. We develop a GIS-based management website for the end user to monitor the running of the whole system. All the sensing stations, the real time performance of the algae harvesting factory, the locations of salvaging boats and the automatically generated cleanup schedule are displayed in the map.