Multiagents and Pollutant Monitoring

The purpose of controlling pollutant emissions is importan t in environmental quality preservation. However, in order to contr l, a previous step including pollutant measurement and assessment should be per form d. What this paper suggests is the application of a robotic mult iagent system to evaluate pollutant levels in the neighbourhood of one or more pol lutant sources. In generic terms, this is the problem of searching and sampling a set of variables within a large dimension environment. The implemented case study is the simulation of a cloud produced by a power-plant chimney monitor ed by a set of helicopter models equipped with sensor and processing devi ces. These robotic agents are controlled by a behavioural archit ecture and communicate through a simple signalling process. They have two ki nds of behaviours: individual ones, which permit them to accomplish the mission on their ow n and groupbehaviours that increase the society performance by gather ing and spreading agents around interesting locations. Both sensors and b ehaviours are quite elementary, however, they are able to produce good results, howing that such a complex problem may be solved with a low congnition approach . The paper describes some simulation results on the reconstr uction of pollutant clouds generated according to different environment condi tions. Other keywords:Agents, Agent societies, Autonomous robots, Simulation models, Po llutant monitoring ? Supported by JNICT, scholarship no. BM2902 from “Programa d e mobilidade de recursos humanos”. Multiagents and Pollutant Monitoring Abstract. The purpose of controlling pollutant emissions is importan t in environmental quality preservation. However, in order to contr l, a previous step including pollutant measurement and assessment should be per form d. The purpose of controlling pollutant emissions is importan t in environmental quality preservation. However, in order to contr l, a previous step including pollutant measurement and assessment should be per form d. What this paper suggests is the application of a robotic mult iagent system to evaluate pollutant levels in the neighbourhood of one or more pol lutant sources. In generic terms, this is the problem of searching and sampling a set of variables within a large dimension environment. The implemented case study is the simulation of a cloud produced by a power-plant chimney monitor ed by a set of helicopter models equipped with sensor and processing devi ces. These robotic agents are controlled by a behavioural archit ecture and communicate through a simple signalling process. They have two ki nds of behaviours: individual ones, which permit them to accomplish the mission on their ow n and groupbehaviours that increase the society performance by gather ing and spreading agents around interesting locations. Both sensors and b ehaviours are quite elementary, however, they are able to produce good results, howing that such a complex problem may be solved with a low congnition approach . The paper describes some simulation results on the reconstr uction of pollutant clouds generated according to different environment condi tions. Topic areas: Intelligent information retrieval, Multi-agent and distributed pro blemsolving, Robotics.