Multi-robot odor distribution mapping in realistic time-variant conditions

This paper tackles the problem of multi-robot odor distribution mapping through time series analysis. Considering the conditions of real world environments where the chemical concentration distribution is patchy, intermittent and time-variant, we propose a method to incorporate the temporal and spatial aspect of sensory data into the problem of odor distribution mapping. Despite the previous works in this field, the method gives more importance to the recent acquired measurements and also to the measurements which have been spatially closer to the place of the sensors (at the time of their acquisition). Real experiments were done in a realistic small-scale controlled environment (designed for systematic olfactory tests), considering up to five real robots and two different navigation algorithms. Experiments show that the generated odor maps are remarkably more accurate than the results of the conventional spatial interpolation method. Studying various spatio-temporal neighborhoods in the time series analysis concluded that a proper definition of the neighborhood (in time and space) provides accurate results in gas distribution mapping.