Active Airflow Generation to Assist Robotic Gas Source Localization: Initial Experiments in Outdoor Environment

Abstract

A new gas source localization method that uses actively generated airflow is proposed. A gas source localization robot searches for the location of a gas source by tracking a gas plume in the upwind direction. However, the robot often fails in tracking the plume in an actual environment owing to the large fluctuations of the airflow field and the plume structure. To overcome this problem, we propose to deploy in the environment a swarm of mobile robots equipped with fans to generate a stable airflow field so that a stable gas plume will be formed and the robot can easily track it. Experimental results are presented to show that the variations of the airflow field can be suppressed by the actively generated airflow even in an outdoor environment. It is also shown that errors in the gas source direction estimated by the robot can be reduced by the proposed method.