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Information-based search for an atmospheric release using a mobile robot: algorithm and experiments
journal contribution
posted on 2018-07-31, 12:45 authored by Michael Hutchinson, Cunjia LiuCunjia Liu, Wen-Hua ChenWen-Hua ChenFinding the location and strength of an unknown hazardous release is of paramount importance in emergency response and environmental monitoring, thus it has been an active research area for several years known as source term estimation. This paper presents a joint Bayesian estimation and planning algorithm to guide a mobile robot to collect informative measurements, allowing the source parameters to be
estimated quickly and accurately. The estimation is performed recursively using Bayes’ theorem, where uncertainties in the
meteorological and dispersion parameters are considered and the intermittent readings from a low-cost gas sensor are addressed
by a novel likelihood function. The planning strategy is designed to maximize the expected utility function based on the estimated information gain of the source parameters. Subsequently, this paper presents the first experimental result of such a system in turbulent, diffusive conditions, in which a ground robot
equipped with a low-cost gas sensor responds to the hazardous source stimulated by incense sticks. The experimental results
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed estimation and search algorithm for source term estimation based on a mobile
robot and a low-cost sensor.
Funding
This work was supported by the UK Ministry of Defence via the Defence and Security Accelerator under grant number ACC101517; Prof. W.-H. Chen’s involvement was also supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EP/K014307/1.
History
School
- Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Department
- Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering
Published in
IEEE Transactions on Control Systems TechnologyVolume
27Issue
6Pages
2388 - 2402Citation
HUTCHINSON, M., LIU, C. and CHEN, W-H., 2019. Information-based search for an atmospheric release using a mobile robot: algorithm and experiments. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 27(6), pp. 2388 - 2402.Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-06-26Publication date
2018-08-27Copyright date
2019Notes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ISSN
1063-6536eISSN
1558-0865Publisher version
Language
- en