A performance comparison of bio-inspired behaviours for odour source localisation

Authors

Abstract

Detecting and locating odour sources with mobile robots is hard, yet an interesting problem for many real world applications. In nature, this problem is daily and successfully addressed as a way to survive. This success motivated researchers to adapt the observed biological search strategies for robots. Each of these strategies is meant to operate under specific environmental conditions and, despite being inherently different, they can be decomposed into a small set of behaviours. The present paper compares the performance of those behaviours in finding and tracking odour plumes to their sources, under diverse environmental conditions. The experimental results show that the performance of each behaviour is highly dependent on its parameters, as well as on the involving environmental conditions and thus, the behaviour employed must be carefully selected. The resulting knowledge may be used by the community for producing better performing strategies, either by hand-designing them or through learning methods.

Conference

2019 IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC), April 2019

DOI