Least square estimation based mobile robot gas source localization in stable-airflow environment

Large amount experimental results show that the gas concentration approximates to Gaussian distribution in stable-airflow environments in which both the wind speed and direction have no large-scale fluctuation. A novel vision/olfaction fusion method based on least square estimation is put forward. The plausible areas are determined using vision information, and the theoretical gas concentration of all the sampled locations in every plausible area can be calculated using the turbulent-diffusion model. The minimum deviation between the theoretical gas concentration and the real one is estimated using least square method to declare which plausible area is the real source. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.