Hazardous Environment Inspection with an Odor Sensing Mobile Robot

Mobile robots are increasingly being used in situations of high-risk for man such as demining, radioactive waste site reconnaissance and “search and rescue” tasks in damaged areas. They can be also of great value in the automated monitoring of chemical warehouses and industrial sites against hazardous fluid leakages, thus increasing the safety level for human operators. This paper describes recent and current research at the University of Lecce aiming at developing a mobile “sentry” with olfactory capability for hazardous site survey. An innovative smart transducer array of tin oxide chemical sensors, compliant with the standard interface IEEE 1451, is introduced and integrated on a differential drive mobile robot in order to provide the vehicle with olfactory sensing. A strategy for environment inspection is proposed comprising two stages. The first stage is a typical path learning operation during which the vehicle is remotely controlled by an operator through potential critical locations, while the vehicle records its course relying on its odometric position estimation system. The second stage is the real automated inspection process where the vehicle tracks the prerecorded trajectory using non-linear feedback control. Along its path, the mobile robot is able to build real time olfactory maps of the environment serving as a mobile electronic “watch”. Detailed experimental results are described obtained with our mobile sentry operating in a laboratory environment. Keywords-Sentry robot, Odour source identification, Artificial olfaction, Standard Sensor interface, Smooth path planning, Non-linear feedback control. ‡‡ Corresponding author: Giulio Reina, Viale Japigia 182, Bari, 70125, Italy; phone: +39 080 5962708; fax: +39 080 5962777; e-mail: [email protected].