Improving Odour Analysis Through Human-Robot Cooperation

More and more work in the field of artificial olfaction considers the integration of olfaction onto robotic systems. An important part of this integration is providing the robot with the ability to discriminate between different odour substances. This work presents the integration of an electronic nose onto a complete robotic system with multi-sensing modalities. The ambition of this work is to illustrate how classification performance of odours can be improved through the exploitation of the mobility of a robot, as well as through the cooperation between a human user and an electronic perceptual system. These points are highlighted in the context of a online robotic system designed to perform different tasks which require the ability to discriminate between odour characters. The robotic system and experimental results are presented where these tasks are tested and evaluated.