Multi Robot Trajectory Generation for Single Source Explosion Parameter Estimation

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the parameters of the advection-diffusion equation, which describes the propagation of an instantaneously released gas. A team of mobile robots, equipped with appropriate sensing devices, are used for collecting gas concentration measurements. In addition, each of the robots has sensitive anemometric vanes for determining the velocity and the direction of the wind. The selection of the sequence of locations, where the robot should go to collect the gas concentration measurements, is performed in real-time and is based on the minimization of the uncertainty of the estimated parameters and on reducing the time to convergence of this estimation problem. Simulation results are presented in order to confirm the described approach, which has significantly lower computational requirements than other well-known techniques based on exhaustive global search.