Abstract
Bionic technology provides a new elicitation for mobile robot navigation since it explores the way to imitate biological senses. In the present study, the challenging problem was how to fuse different biological senses and guide distributed robots to cooperate with each other for target searching. This paper integrates smell, hearing and touch to design an odor/sound tracking multi-robot system. The olfactory robot tracks the chemical odor plume step by step through information fusion from gas sensors and airflow sensors, while two hearing robots localize the sound source by time delay estimation (TDE) and the geometrical position of microphone array. Furthermore, this paper presents a heading direction based mobile robot navigation algorithm, by which the robot can automatically and stably adjust its velocity and direction according to the deviation between the current heading direction measured by magnetoresistive sensor and the expected heading direction acquired through the odor/sound localization strategies. Simultaneously, one robot can communicate with the other robots via a wireless sensor network (WSN). Experimental results show that the olfactory robot can pinpoint the odor source within the distance of 2 m, while two hearing robots can quickly localize and track the olfactory robot in 2 min. The devised multi-robot system can achieve target search with a considerable success ratio and high stability.
Highlights
With the development of biology and computer science, bionic robots have become a hot topic in the field of intelligent robots
Bionic mobile olfactory robots are known as active olfaction systems or active electronic noses (e-noses), which can perceive odors/gases such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) [5,6,7,8,9], and actively track and search for the odor/gas source
The olfactory robot can find the odor source target using at most 10 steps within the arena radius of 2 m, while two hearing robots can precisely find their companion namely the olfaction robot in 2 min
Summary
With the development of biology and computer science, bionic robots have become a hot topic in the field of intelligent robots. Bionic mobile olfactory robots are known as active olfaction systems or active electronic noses (e-noses), which can perceive odors/gases such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) [5,6,7,8,9], and actively track and search for the odor/gas source. Ishida imitated the way as the moth searched for the chemical bombykol, and took full advantage of odor and wind direction information to realize plume tracing [11] Afterwards, he developed the second generation robot GaPTR-II, and proposed the transient response based algorithm [12]. Research on mobile robot navigation combining smell, hearing and touch for odor/sound search has never been reported before. Results show that the olfaction/hearing robots can search for odor/sound source effectively and efficiently
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