Robot chemotaxis

Tracking scents and locating odor sources is a major challenge in robotics. These experiments revealed that a concentration gradient can be extracted from a turbulent plume in dense conditions when the robot moves slowly (2.5 cm/s) and near to the source (search area = 2.9 m2). To move the robot in the vicinity of the source, we considered the possibility of exploring the environment by using vision, in addition to olfaction. The main limitation is that odor source candidates need to be identifiable from visual features.