Abstraction of Odor Source Declaration Algorithm from Moth-Inspired Plume Tracing Strategies

A moth behavior-inspired strategy, including tracing a chemical plume to its source and declaring the source location, was tested in near shore ocean conditions via a REMUS underwater vehicle. The Held experiments demonstrated the plume tracing distances over 100 m 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 location in turbulent fluid environments via an underwater vehicle. The main idea is to use last chemical detection points (LCDPs) to construct a source identification zone (SIZ) 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 simulation 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 CPT test runs in an operation area with length scales of 100 meters.