Robot odour localisation in enclosed and cluttered environments using naïve physics
Creators: name: Kowadlo, Gideon
Publisher: name: Monash University
Year: 2017
Subjects: Uncategorized

description: Odour localisation is the problem of finding the source of an odour or other volatile chemical. It promises many valuable practical and humanitarian applications. Most localisation methods require a robot to reactively track an odour plume along its entire length. This approach is time consuming and may be not be possible in a cluttered indoor environment, where airflow tends to form sectors of circulating airflow. Such environments may be encountered in crawl-ways under floors, roof cavities, mines, caves, tree-canopies, air-ducts, sewers or tunnel systems. Operation in these places is important for such applications as search and rescue and locating the sources of toxic chemicals in an industrial setting. This thesis addresses odour localisation in this class of environments. The solution consists of a sense-map-plan-act style control scheme (and low level behaviour based controller) with two main stages. Firstly, the airflow in the environment is modelled using naive physics rules which are encapsulated into an algorithm named a Naive Reasoning Machine. It was used in preference to conventional methods as it is fast, does not require boundary conditions, and most importantly, provides approximate solutions to the degree of accuracy required for the task, with analogical data structures that are readily useful to a reasoning algorithm. Secondly, a reasoning algorithm navigates the robot to specific target locations that are determined with a physical map, the airflow map, and knowledge of odour dispersal. Sensor measurements at the target positions provide information regarding the likelihood that odour was emitted from potential odour source locations. The target positions and their traversal are determined so that all the potential odour source sites are accounted for. The core method provides values corresponding to the confidence that the odour source is located in a given region. A second search stage exploiting vision is then used to locate the specific location of the odour source within the predicted region. This comprises the second part of a bi-modal, two-stage search, with each stage exploiting complementary sensing modalities. Single hypothesis airflow modelling faces limitations due to the fact that large differences between airflow topologies are predicted for only small variations in a physical map. This is due to uncertainties in the map and approximations in the modelling process. Furthermore, there are uncertainties regarding the flow direction through inlet/outlet ducts. A method is presented for dealing with these uncertainties, by generating multiple airflow hypotheses. As the robot performs odour localisation, airflow in the environment is measured and used to adjust the confidences of the hypotheses using Bayesian inference. The best hypothesis is then selected, which allows the completion of the localisation task. This method improves the robustness of odour localisation in the presence of uncertainties, making it possible where the single hypothesis method would fail. It also demonstrates the potential for integrating naive physics into a statistical framework. Extensive experimental results are presented to support the methods described above.