Using local wind information for gas distribution mapping in outdoor environments with a mobile robot

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a statistical method to build two-dimensional gas distribution maps (Kernel DM+V/W algorithm). In addition to gas sensor measurements, the proposed method also takes into account wind information by modeling the information content of the gas sensor measurements as a bivariate Gaussian kernel whose shape depends on the measured wind vector. We evaluate the method based on real measurements in an outdoor environment obtained with a mobile robot that was equipped with gas sensors and an ultrasonic anemometer for wind measurements. As a measure of the model quality we compute how well unseen measurements are predicted in terms of the data likelihood. The initial results are encouraging and show a clear improvement of the proposed method compared to the case where wind is not considered.