Learning to detect proximity to a gas source with a mobile robot

As a sub-task of the general gas source localisation problem, gas source declaration is the process of determining the certainty that a source is in the immediate vicinity. Due to the turbulent character of gas transport in a natural indoor environment, it is not sufficient to search for instantaneous concentration maxima, in order to solve this task. Therefore, this paper introduces a method to classify whether an object is a gas source from a series of concentration measurements, recorded while the robot performs a rotation manoeuvre in front of a possible source. For three different gas source positions, a total of 1056 declaration experiments were carried out at different robot-to-source distances. Based on these readings, support vector machines (SVM) with optimised learning parameters were trained and the cross-validation classification performance was evaluated. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach to detect proximity to a gas source using only gas sensors. The paper also presents an analysis of the classification rate depending on the desired declaration accuracy, and a comparison with the classification rate that can be achieved by selecting an optimal threshold value regarding the mean sensor signal.