Distributed robotics approach to chemical plume tracing

Abstract

This paper presents an application of a physics-based framework for distributed control of autonomous vehicles. The autonomous swarm uses local information to self-organize into dynamic sensing and computation grids during localization of the source of a toxic plume. Using physics of fluid flow, we develop a new plume-tracing algorithm, and then use computational fluid dynamics simulations to show that the new approach outperforms the leading biomimetic competitors for this task.