Design of Source Identification Zones for Declaring an Odor Source in Turbulent Fluid-Advected Environments

Abstract

A moth behavior-inspired strategy was tested in near shore ocean conditions via a REMUS underwater vehicle. The field experiments demonstrated the plume tracing distances over 100m and the source declaration accuracy relative to the nominal source location on the order of tens of meters. However, the source declaration still leaves significant room for improvement. This paper presents two approaches to declaring the odor source via an autonomous underwater vehicle. The main idea is to use last chemical detection points to construct a source identification zone in the order of time series or of the most recent up-flow direction. The performance of the proposed approaches is evaluated using a simulated turbulent fluid environment. The studies show that a success rate in declaring the odor source reaches over 98% and the average error of the declared source locations is less than 1 meter for 1000 test runs in an operation area with length scales of 100 meters. Source verification is developed using a fuzzy reasoning segmentation algorithm to recognize the odor source