Using Chemical Sensors as "Noses" for Mobile Robots

Over the past two decades, various research efforts have been made to employ chemical sensing capabilities on mobile robot platforms. This chapter presents the tasks that mobile robots are expected to accomplish with the help of chemical sensing capabilities with the technical challenges involved in those tasks. Then, it presents hardware setups that people can use and various algorithms that have been proposed to accomplish the tasks. The chapter deals with the detection of airborne gas-phase chemical substances by mobile robots. It also mentions underwater chemical sensing. Research on mobile robot olfaction seems to be getting into a next phase in which the research efforts are more directed toward real applications. It may be too ambitious to develop a versatile gas source localization robot that can be used in any environment. One of the promising applications for gas sensing mobile robots is to find methane leaks in landfill sites.