Olfactory sensory system for Odour-Plume tracking and localization

Abstract

Autonomous search of odour sources is a problem that once solved can bring large improvements to tasks like: humnnitarian demining, airportpatmlling, and hazardous chemical leaks detection. The main obstacles to the research in this area are the properties of current gas sensors (slow, weakly selective and poorly sensitive) and the dificulty to estimate the physical characteristics of natural odour plumes due to the "disturbances" caused by turbulence, namely meandering and intermittence. This paper presents an active olfactory sensing system that intends to be applicable to search for odour sources in outdoor environments. Three modular intelligent modules compose this olfactory system: two gas sensing nostrils and a directional ihermal anemometer The informntion coming from the sensing modules isfused with the spatio-temporal localization of a mobile mbot in order to estimate the localization of a specific odour source. The mobile robot is controlled by a state-based odour-searching algorithm. Each sensing module self-adjust its characteristics (sensibilify, selectivify and lime-response) in order to optimise the information perceived during each searching state. The paper describes the sensing modules and presents results gathered with them. A special emphasis is given to the wavelet-based signal processing, implemented for the fast identification of odour puffs.

Multi-Robot Fire Searching in Unknown Environment

“…The authors have addressed this issue in previous papers [15], [16], [17] and [18]. The last achievement of that research is kheNose.…”

Multi-robot olfactory search in structured environments

“…The robots were initially released at the downwind side of the testbed (similar to many other previous works namely [10,8]) in the experiments. This is the same task that the handlers of SaR dogs do at the start of the search mission.…”

“…Researchers have developed methods that employ combinations and variations of plume acquisition [8,9] and plume upwind following [5,8,10] using reactive control algorithms (a comparison of these methods is in [11]). Most of these approaches are inspired by very simple creatures like moths [3], glowworms [12], etc, therefore they are mostly low-level algorithms making the robot react to the environmental changes based on some defined rules.…”

Multi-robot Topological Exploration Using Olfactory Cues

“…The researchers have developed methods that employ combinations and variations of plume acquisition and plume upwind following using reactive control algorithms. However, most of the significant projects have addressed the problem with a single robot [1,17,18,19] and/or in open, free obstacle spaces [19,20]. However, this paper attends to fulfill the goals using multiple robots in a structural environment (similar to a real building of a warehouse).…”

“…The authors have been working on the problem of finding odor and fire sources with robots in previous studies [1,2,3,4,5]. This current project tries to address the problem of odor source searching in unknown environments by complementing it with the environment exploration and mapping.…”