A Multi-robot Chemical Source Localization Strategy Based on Fluid Physics: Experimental Results

Abstract

This chapter examines three different multi-robot strategies that can be used for localization of chemical sources. In particular, we envision a team of inexpensive, simple vehicles with short-range, low-power sensing, communication, and processing capabilities, designed to trace a chemical plume to its source emitter. Here, we describe a software environment that combines computational fluid dynamics methods for generating chemical plumes, and a high-performance implementation of the physicomimetics control algorithm into a useful testbed for evaluating swarm-based approaches to the plume-tracing problem. We explore the key issues concerning cooperative multi-vehicle sensing, communication, and control in a context of two large chemical plume-tracing studies. One important outcome of our investigation shows that our physics-based algorithm outperforms methods that originated as emulations of biological organisms. Our work shows that high success rate can be achieved by robots using strictly local information and a fully-decentralized, fault-tolerant, reactive control algorithm.