Gas source localization (GSL) is one of the most important and direct applications of a gas sensitive mobile robot, and consists in searching for one or multiple volatile
emission sources with a mobile robot that has improved sensing
capabilities (i.e. olfaction, wind flow, etc.). This work adresses GSL by employing a teleoperated mobile robot, and focuses on
which search strategy is the most suitable for this teleoperated approach. Four different search strategies, namely chemotaxis,
anemotaxis, gas-mapping, and visual-aided search, are analyzed
and evaluated according to a set of proposed indicators (e.g. accuracy,
efficiency, success rate, etc.) to determine the most suitable
one for a human-teleoperated mobile robot. Experimental validation is carried out employing a large dataset composed of over 150 trials where volunteer operators had to locate a gas-leak in a virtual environment under various and realistic environmental conditions (i.e. different wind flow patterns and gas source locations). We report different findings, from which we highlight that, against intuition, visual-aided search is not always the best strategy, but depends on the environmental conditions and the operator’s ability to understand how gas distributes.
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