An ecological approach to odour recognition in intelligent environments

We present a new approach for odour detection and recognition based on a so-called PEIS-Ecology: a network of gas sensors and a mobile robot are integrated in an intelligent environment. The environment can provide information regarding the location of potential odour sources, which is then relayed to a mobile robot equipped with an electronic nose. The robot can then perform a more thorough analysis of the odour character. This is a novel approach which alleviates some the challenges in mobile olfaction techniques by single and embedded mobile robots. The environment also provides contextual information which can be used to constrain the learning of odours, which is shown to improve classification performance