A Distributed Source Term Estimation Algorithm for Multi-Robot Systems

Finding sources of airborne chemicals with mobile sensing systems finds applications in safety, security, and emergency situations related to medical, domestic, and environmental domains. Given the often critical nature of all the applications, it is important to reduce the amount of time necessary to accomplish this task through intelligent systems and algorithms. In this paper, we extend a previously presented algorithm based on source term estimation for odor source localization for homogeneous multi-robot systems. By gradually increasing the level of coordination among multiple mobile robots, we study the benefits of a distributed system on reducing the amount of time and resources necessary to achieve the task at hand. The method has been evaluated systematically through high-fidelity simulations and in a wind tunnel emulating realistic and repeatable conditions in different coordination scenarios and with different number of robots.