An Airflow Analysis Study of Quadrotor Based Flying Sniffer Robot

Abstract

Wheeled based sniffer robots have been using in current research trend of odor plume tracking, but they have a serious pitfall because they only perform2D odor plume tracking which is ineffective. The main reason of being ineffective is because wheeled sniffer robots ignore the fact that the majority of odor plumes are released into 3D space instead of 2D space. Therefore, a flying sniffer robot is needed to overcome 3D odor plume tracking problem. In this paper, we propose to use a quadrotor as the locomotion of a flying sniffer robot. In order to make sure the quadrotor based flying sniffer robot can perform well in odor plumes tracking, we have carried out a detail study in airflow simulation analysis by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. Besides, we also conducted experiments to determine the odor sensing ability of quadrotor based flying sniffer robot. From our experiments, we are able to identify the odor sensing region of quadrotor based flying sniffer robot in quantitative measurement. From airflow analysis simulation study and experiments, we proved that a quadrotor based flying sniffer robot is a feasible solution for 3D odor plume tracking.