On Designing a Cooperative Control System for Multiple Mobile Robots to Locate the Source of Odor*

This paper deals with the problem of odor source localization using a multi-robot system. A cooperative control system, which can coordinate the multi-robot system to locate the source of odor, is designed and independently executed by each robot. The proposed cooperative control system consists of three levels. In the first level, based on a mixture ensemble Kalman filtering theory, a new cooperative search algorithm, which can predict the probable position of the odor source by exploiting the information among the multi-robot system, is proposed. In the second level, a trajectory planning algorithm, by which the next position of a robot can be generated according to the predicted position of the odor source, detection events and nondetection events, is developed. In the third level, a consensus algorithm is used to control the robot to move toward the next position. Finally, the performance capabilities of the proposed cooperative control system are illustrated for the problem of odor source localization.