Artificial olfaction in connection with sensor networks and mobile robots has a great potential for a number of important real-world applications, including pollution monitoring, leak detection, inspection of landfills, search and rescue etc. When opening up to real-world scenarios, however, airborne chemical sensing presents a number of specific challenges. The chaotic nature of odor transport in natural, dynamic environments complicates the basic tasks of sensor calibration, gas detection, odor discrimination, gas source localization, trail following, and gas distribution modeling. Another basic difficulty is that the commonly used, inexpensive gas sensors typically do not reach a steady state response being exposed to quickly fluctuating gas concentrations. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from sensor networks and mobile robotics who face the same challenges in developing artificial olfaction solutions for real world applications. We solicit paper submissions that cover the full range of relevant research on olfaction in natural, dynamic environments, including works on the theoretical foundations, sensor technology, machine learning or biologically inspired approaches, sensor fusion and progress reports on actual real-world systems.
In 2007 an effort to collect works which were starting to address the issues relevant for the real-world challenges of mobile robot olfaction was successfully made in an ICRA workshop titled "Robotic Olfaction - Towards Real Applications Towards Real Applications". Since then, a number of initiatives have gained success in Europe and internationally with projects working towards monitoring of port harbors, urban pollution monitoring with mobile robots, inspection of landfills and more. Now, three years later, this workshop proposes to examine the progress of such initiatives and pool together the scientific contributions of these efforts in the context of real-world applications. Centered around these initiatives, the workshop aims at providing a forum for research work that covers a multitude of relevant aspects for olfaction in natural, dynamic environments, including works on the theoretical foundations, sensor technology, machine learning or biologically inspired approaches, and sensor fusion. According to its topic, the workshop will put a strong focus on experimental validation using actual gas sensors. A particular motivation of the proposed workshop is to bring together researchers from different communities, especially from sensor networks and mobile robotics, who face the same challenges in developing artificial olfaction solutions for real world applications. A moderated discussion with the participants at the end of the workshop is planned to improve mutual understanding of domain specific problems and solutions, and to stimulate a discussion on the many shared challenges.
We solicit submissions of research papers reporting significant research results. Papers should be maximum 8 pages, following ICRA-2010 paper format instructions. Submissions must be sent by e-mail to <achim.lilienthal (a) oru.se> and <amy.loutfi (a) oru.se> as CC. Only PDF files will be accepted. Other, non-standard formats (e.g., Word) cannot be accepted. More information is available under the link
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