Designing signal processing for robotic olfaction based on electroantennogram

Abstract

In this study, we experimentally evaluated a signal-processing method for the stable use of an insect antenna as an odor sensor for a robot because of its excellent sensitivity and selectivity to odors. Changes in potential in response to an odor stimulus can be measured when the electrodes are connected to both ends of an insect antenna. This is called an electroantennogram (EAG), and is a type of physiological response. Hence, we must extract only the EAG waveform using appropriate signal processing because it has a low signal-to-noise ratio. Accordingly, we applied signal processing based on an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA), which demonstrates excellent real-time performance, to an EAG to eliminate high-frequency noise. Moreover, we experimentally investigated the sampling rate to properly measure the EAG. From the results, the EAG-driven robot with the designed signal processing demonstrated a search performance of more than 70%, even in odor-source localization experiments with different types of moths and environments.