Abstract
This work presents a simulation framework developed under the widely used Robot Operating System (ROS) to enable the validation of robotics systems and gas sensing algorithms under realistic environments. The framework is rooted in the principles of computational fluid dynamics and filament dispersion theory, modeling wind flow and gas dispersion in 3D real-world scenarios (i.e., accounting for walls, furniture, etc.). Moreover, it integrates the simulation of different environmental sensors, such as metal oxide gas sensors, photo ionization detectors, or anemometers. We illustrate the potential and applicability of the proposed tool by presenting a simulation case in a complex and realistic office-like environment where gas leaks of different chemicals occur simultaneously. Furthermore, we accomplish quantitative and qualitative validation by comparing our simulated results against real-world data recorded inside a wind tunnel where methane was released under different wind flow profiles. Based on these results, we conclude that our simulation framework can provide a good approximation to real world measurements when advective airflows are present in the environment.
Highlights
Environmental monitoring, gas emission surveillance and other gas-sensing related tasks have nowadays grown in significance due to increasing health and environmental concerns.For example, many developed cities worldwide are pushing towards better pollution monitoring infrastructure while biogas producers, such as landfill sites, are adopting stricter methane emission surveillance systems
We introduce GADEN, an open source gas dispersion simulation framework aimed at Mobile robot olfaction (MRO) related applications
The main reasons behind the election of this specific dispersion model are that it represents a good compromise between complexity and computational power, it is designed to replicate both the short-term and long-term exposure statistics of a chemical evolving in a turbulent flow, and it does not rely on a mathematical plume model, but is based on modelling different physical phenomenons that occur during gas dispersion
Summary
Environmental monitoring, gas emission surveillance and other gas-sensing related tasks have nowadays grown in significance due to increasing health and environmental concerns. It is of high importance to have proper evaluation tools to facilitate the development of new algorithms, sensors and platforms that comprise MRO systems In this context, simulation tools with the capacity to properly handle the gas dispersion phenomenon can be used to perform extensive evaluations before moving to experimental trials in the real world. Different approaches have been developed and presented, ranging from simplistic models based on Gaussian-shaped plumes [18] to sophisticated fluid dynamics models that consider topological and environmental variables in the computation process [19] Most of these approaches do not consider sensing devices or mobile robots in the simulation, and while a few implementations of robotics-oriented gas dispersion simulation frameworks exist, they only consider simplified environments, are developed in outdated robotic software platforms or rely on expensive, external software packages.
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