Macedo João, Marques Lino, Costa Ernesto
Institute of Systems and Robotics, University of Coimbra, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal.
Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 May 14;19(10):2231. doi: 10.3390/s19102231.
Locating odour sources with robots is an interesting problem with many important real-world applications. In the past years, the robotics community has adapted several bio-inspired strategies to search for odour sources in a variety of environments. This work studies and compares some of the most common strategies from a behavioural perspective with the aim of knowing: (1) how different are the behaviours exhibited by the strategies for the same perceptual state; and (2) which are the most consensual actions for each perceptual state in each environment. The first step of this analysis consists of clustering the perceptual states, and building histograms of the actions taken for each cluster. In case of (1), a histogram is made for each strategy separately, whereas for (2), a single histogram containing the actions of all strategies is produced for each cluster of states. Finally, statistical hypotheses tests are used to find the statistically significant differences between the behaviours of the strategies in each state. The data used for performing this study was gathered from a purpose-built simulator which accurately simulates the real-world phenomena of odour dispersion and air flow, whilst being sufficiently fast to be employed in learning and evolutionary robotics experiments. This paper also proposes an xml-inspired structure for the generated datasets that are used to store the perceptual information of the robots over the course of the simulations. These datasets may be used in learning experiments to estimate the quality of a candidate solution or for measuring its novelty.
利用机器人定位气味源是一个有趣的问题,在许多重要的实际应用中都有涉及。在过去几年里,机器人学界采用了多种受生物启发的策略,在各种环境中搜索气味源。这项工作从行为角度研究并比较了一些最常见的策略,目的是了解:(1)对于相同的感知状态,这些策略所表现出的行为有多大差异;(2)在每种环境中,针对每种感知状态,最一致的行动是什么。该分析的第一步包括对感知状态进行聚类,并为每个聚类构建所采取行动的直方图。对于(1),分别为每个策略制作一个直方图,而对于(2),为每个状态聚类生成一个包含所有策略行动的单一直方图。最后,使用统计假设检验来找出每个状态下各策略行为之间的统计显著差异。用于进行这项研究的数据是从一个专门构建的模拟器收集的,该模拟器能准确模拟气味扩散和气流的真实世界现象,同时速度足够快,可用于学习和进化机器人实验。本文还为生成的数据集提出了一种受xml启发的结构,用于存储机器人在模拟过程中的感知信息。这些数据集可用于学习实验,以估计候选解决方案的质量或衡量其新颖性。