Experimental Comparison of Spiral and Zigzag Algorithms for Odor Plume Finding in An Outdoor Natural Airflow Environment

Abstract

Plume finding is the fundamental phase for the robot based odor source localization. In outdoor natural airflow environments, the fast change in both the wind speed and direction poses big challenges for a robot to find plume. This paper presents an experimental study of the spiral and zigzag algorithms for the odor plume finding in an outdoor natural wind environment. The zigzag algorithm is divided into up-flow and down-flow zigzag algorithms based on the initial motion direction. The performances of the spiral and zigzag based plume finding algorithms are compared using the indices of finding time and success rate. Experimental results show that all of these algorithms present a high successful rate, but the average plume-finding time of down-flow zigzag algorithm is the shortest among the three algorithms.