Autonomous Vehicles, Volume 2

15Implementation of Veco-Taxis in Turbulent Environment for Gas Source Localization

Kumar Gaurav

Department of Mechatronics Engineering, Manipal University Jaipur, India

Abstract

Recent chemical gas leakage incidents in India have forced the scientific community to look out for intelligent and smart solutions to prevent these catastrophes. Such incidents pose a threat to human lives as well as the animal kingdom, disturbing the ecological balance. Hence monitoring of a potential leak source becomes important as it can give preparation time to trigger appropriate actions. This chapter presents the implementation of veco-taxis, an algorithm to locate the gas source in a turbulent environment. Veco-taxis is adapted from our previous work. It provides angular direction to a mobile robot so that it can climb up the concentration gradient and reach the vicinity of a gas source. We test its feasibility in a simulated turbulent environment on a mobile robotic platform which is at a distance of 16 meters approximately from the gas source. Results of the simulation experiments show that veco-taxis has successfully identified the gas source with a 15% success rate even without wind information.

Keywords: Gas leakage, gas source localization, mobile robot, environment safety, localization algorithm, turbulent environment

15.1 Introduction

Gas source localization (GSL) is the act of finding the potential source of gas leakage in any establishment. It mainly involves three stages, viz ...