Ercolani Chiara, Jin Wanting, Martinoli Alcherio
Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Laboratory, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Oct 17;23(20):8512. doi: 10.3390/s23208512.
Within the scope of the ongoing efforts to fight climate change, the application of multi-robot systems to environmental mapping and monitoring missions is a prominent approach aimed at increasing exploration efficiency. However, the application of such systems to gas sensing missions has yet to be extensively explored and presents some unique challenges, mainly due to the hard-to-sense and expensive-to-model nature of gas dispersion. For this paper, we explored the application of a multi-robot system composed of rotary-winged nano aerial vehicles to a gas sensing mission. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the interference between different robots and the effect on their sensing performance. We then assessed this effect, by deploying several algorithms for 3D gas sensing with increasing levels of coordination in a state-of-the-art wind tunnel facility. The results show that multi-robot gas sensing missions can be robust against documented interference and degradation in their sensing performance. We additionally highlight the competitiveness of multi-robot strategies in gas source location performance with tight mission time constraints.
在当前应对气候变化的努力范围内，将多机器人系统应用于环境测绘和监测任务是提高勘探效率的一种突出方法。然而，此类系统在气体传感任务中的应用尚未得到广泛探索，并且存在一些独特的挑战，主要是由于气体扩散难以感知且建模成本高昂。在本文中，我们探索了由旋翼纳米飞行器组成的多机器人系统在气体传感任务中的应用。我们对不同机器人之间的干扰及其对传感性能的影响进行了定性和定量分析。然后，我们通过在最先进的风洞设施中部署几种用于三维气体传感的算法，并逐步提高协调程度，来评估这种影响。结果表明，多机器人气体传感任务能够抵御已记录的干扰及其传感性能的下降。我们还强调了在任务时间限制严格的情况下，多机器人策略在气体源定位性能方面的竞争力。
