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 presents also 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.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Datalogi

Computer and Systems Science

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)