Tom Duckett, Mikael Axelsson and Alessandro Saffiotti

Learning to Locate an Odour Source with a Mobile Robot

Proc. ICRA-2001, IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Seoul, Korea, May 2001.


Abstract

We address the problem of enabling a mobile robot to locate a stationary odour source using an electronic nose constructed from gas sensors. On the hardware side, we use a stereo nose architecture consisting of two parallel chambers, each containing an identical set of sensors. On the software side, we use a recurrent artificial neural network to learn the direction to a stationary source from a time series of sensor readings. This contrasts with previous approaches, that rely on the existence of a model of the sensor's dynamics. The complete system is able to orient and turn towards the source. An experimental validation was carried out to evaluate the performance of the system.

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Bibtex 

@INPROCEEDINGS{DuckettICRA01,
 AUTHOR = "T. {Duckett} and M. {Axelsson} and A. {Saffiotti}",
 TITLE = "Learning to Locate an Odour Source with a Mobile Robot",
 BOOKTITLE = "Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'2001)", 
 ADDRESS = "Seoul, Korea",
 YEAR = 2001,
}