Design and Experimental Evaluation of an Odor Sensing Method for a Pocket-Sized Quadcopter

In this study, we design and verify an intake system using the wake of a pocket-sized quadcopter for the chemical plume tracing (CPT) problem. Solving CPT represents an important technique in the field of engineering because it can be used to perform rescue operations at the time of a disaster and to identify sources of harmful substances. An appropriate intake of air when sensing odors plays an important role in performing CPT. Hence, we used the air flow generated by a quadcopter itself to intake chemical particles into two alcohol sensors. By experimental evaluation, we verified that the quadcopter wake intake method has good directivity and can be used to realize CPT. Concretely, even at various odor source heights, the quadcopter had a three-dimensional CPT success rate of at least 70%. These results imply that, although a further development of three-dimensional CPT is necessary in order to conduct it in unknown and cluttered environments, the intake method proposed in this paper enables a pocket-sized quadcopter to perform three-dimensional CPT.

Download Full-text

Multi-robot Based Chemical Plume Tracing with Virtual Odor-Source-Probability Sensor

2009 Sixth International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery ◽

10.1109/fskd.2009.533 ◽

2009 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Fei Li ◽

Qing-Hao Meng ◽

Ji-Gong Li ◽

Shuang Bai ◽

Ming Zeng

Keyword(s):

Odor Source ◽

Chemical Plume Tracing ◽

Plume Tracing ◽

Chemical Plume ◽

Multi Robot

Download Full-text

Chemical plume tracing

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems ◽

10.1177/1729881418755877 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 172988141875587 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Kok Seng Eu ◽

Kian Meng Yap

Keyword(s):

Fluid Dynamics ◽

Computational Fluid Dynamics ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

Multiple Sensors ◽

Chemical Plume Tracing ◽

Plume Tracing ◽

Air Intake ◽

Left And Right ◽

Chemical Plume ◽

Two Stages

Most of the reported three-dimensional chemical plume tracing methods use stereo sensing method to determine the next tracing step direction. For example, multiple sensors are used for detection in the left, right, up and down directions. Left and right detections are feasible for stereo sniffing; unfortunately, the same approach is infeasible for the up/down sensing of the quadrotor platforms because the propellers of the quadrotor continuously draw the air from the top and bring it down, which affects the sensing of the upper and lower sensors, and fails to determine the subsequent tracing step of up/down direction. Therefore, up/down sensing in the surging stage of chemical plume tracing is ineffective for quadrotor platforms (chemical plume tracing has two stages: surging and casting). To solve the problem, we propose an alternative that is not in the surging but in the casting stage of chemical plume tracing, by designing a new three-dimensional chemical plume tracing technique with variations of altitude ( z-axis) control during the casting stage, which has never been considered in the previous works. Besides, we use a computational fluid dynamics software to study the airflow pattern of quadrotor platform. Subsequently, a fuzzy-based stereo-sniffing algorithm is developed by considering the quadrotor propeller’s air intake stream angle associated with the environmental wind direction angle, so as to improve the accuracy of stereo sensing. The results of the proposed solutions are verified and validated via both experimental and simulation approaches.

Download Full-text