An infotaxis based odor navigation approach

Environment pollution has pushed an increasing interest in the development of automated and intelligent systems for monitoring and analyzing environmental variables. In this field, recent applications of mobile robotics systems are being considered, more specifically, the detection of an odor source by a mobile robot. In this paper, an ethanol odor field, coming from a source, is measured by using MOS sensors; then, an odor diffusion model is fitted to the experimental concentration odor map. An infotaxis algorithm, which makes use of this environment information, is implemented combining the spiral and the plume-centered upwind search algorithms. Good results were obtained from a computer simulation test, which was carried out in order to validate the robot performance during an odor detection task.