AASS Seminar - Model-based Multi-Agent Exploration for Gas Source Localization

The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Thomas Wiedemann, Institute of Communications and Navigation, DLR (German Aerospace Center), Oberpfaffenhofen-Wessling, Germany.

About the speaker

Abstract

Mobile multi-agent systems are perfect platforms for exploration or monitoring tasks in hazardous or inhospitable environments, where a human operator would be at risk. Especially, this pertains to emergency scenarios, where toxic material is leaking.

The presentation addresses the development of an efficient information gathering and exploration strategy for robotic missions. The focus of this talk is a multi-agent system – or a swarm – which consists of several mobile sensing platforms with the goal to identify gas sources based on concentration measurements. The exploration strategy makes use of a Partial Differential Equation as a physical model of the gas dispersion process in a probabilistic Bayesian framework. Moreover, the advantages of sparsity assumptions regarding the source distribution in order to speed up the exploration are shown.

Presented results from hardware-in-the-loop simulations demonstrate the potential of the approach. Further, first studies towards “real world” experiments will be presented.