Rotor-induced Airflow for Odor Source Detection on Nano-Quadcopters

We report a nano-quadcopter system that performs odor detection in a windless indoor environment. The system uses the Crazyflie platform and incorporates a single commercially available metal oxide semiconductor gas sensor. We demonstrate that rotor-induced airflow enhances odor detection. It can be considered to be the quadrotor equivalent of sniffing behavior. The Crazyflie-based system was used to characterize the likelihood and power consumption for detection of an odor plume across various rotor-induced flow conditions. Results indicate that rotor-induced airflow increases the detection count by 18.5X while incurring modest increases in power consumption. When the additional power is taken into consideration, detection performance increases more than the power over the entire Pareto front, with a ratio as high as 3.5X under optimal conditions. We conclude that rotor-induced airflow supports a power-aware approach for odor source detection.