To naively smell as no robot has smelt before

Abstract

This paper presents a new intelligent odor localization strategy, which enables a robot to locate the source of an odor in a cluttered indoor environment. Traditionally, work in this area has focused on open areas free of obstacles and having no walls or possessing walls without openings. Existing solutions predominantly use reactive algorithms to navigate along the entire length of the odor plume to the source. Not only is this slow, but in a cluttered indoor environment it may not be possible. In a constrained environment, airflows tend to circulate in sectors and well-defined plumes that lead upwind to the odor source do not exist. We have developed a sense-map-plan-act style control strategy to model the airflow in the environment using naive physics, then use the model to reason about odor dispersal, move to key positions gathering information, and make a prediction of the most likely location for an odor source. The control strategy has located the odor source for a variety of room configurations. This paper describes details of the control strategy, practical experiments, and results.