Multi-robot Topological Exploration Using Olfactory Cues

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents a distributed multi-robot system to search for odor sources inside unknown environments. The robots cooperatively explore the whole environment and generate its topological map. The exploration method is a decentralized frontier based algorithm that is enhanced by considering odor concentration at each frontier inside its cost/gain function. The robots independently generate local topological maps and by transferring them to each other, they are able to integrate these maps and generate a whole global map. The proposed method was tested and validated in real reduced scale scenarios.

Coordinated multi-robot exploration: Out of the box packages for ROS

“…The service call includes destination, data to be transmitted, and a topic on which to publish the data at the destination. The Ad Hoc Communication package wraps the data into an extended MAC frame and transmits the frame using a raw socket (2). Using raw sockets allows the implementation of AODV and MAODV and easy modifications for future improvements running in user space and not in kernel space.…”

“…Within recent years the reliability and performance of single mobile robot systems have increased significantly. Affordable robots are offered allowing research institutions to acquire multiple robots to conduct experiments focusing on the organization of multi-robot teams [2], [3]. Additionally, several frameworks to develop robot software are available.…”

Moving From ‘How to go There?’ to ‘Where to go?’: Towards Increased Autonomy of Mobile Robots

“…They have been selected only based on the expertise of the authors and are not intended to endorse any claim of generality or importance. Other examples include continuous monitoring of temporal-spatial phenomena in partially known environments (e.g., ocean monitoring [28]), olfactory exploration [22], tactile exploration of object properties [25], information gathering [27], and pursuit/evasion [13].…”

Optimal Swarm Formation for Odor Plume Finding

“…Therefore, this problem is usually addressed through general exploration methods [34], mapping [22], [23], or coverage techniques namely zig-zag sweeping, casting, biased random walks [35], lévy-taxis [36], and spiral movements [37], which are also used for other spatial search tasks and are not specifically and efficiently designed for odor plume finding. Since the search space may be much larger than the active area of an odor source, a mobile sensor network can be advantageous in odor plume finding tasks, in comparison to a single robot that can measure only the odor concentration on its own place.…”