Wind-borne Odor Tracking in Three Dimensions: A Biologically-inspired Sensor Fusion Approach

Imagine an aerial vehicle that can track a wind-borne odor to its source. Such a vehicle could be used to locate lost pets and people, pipeline breaks, illegal drug labs, or hazardous chemicals. Although engineers are just beginning to build such a system, several such systems exist in the natural world. Flying animals, particularly insects, use odor plumes to guide themselves to food and mates. By studying this behavior, one can use this as inspiration for the development of an engineered odor tracking system. This is the approach taken in this book. Previous research on biological odor tracking combined with new three-dimensional analyses of this behavior serve as the basis for the development of odor tracking strategies. The resulting odor tracking strategies display several behavioral characteristics that are quite similar to their biological counterparts. Thus, not only are effective odor tracking strategies presented in this work, but new hypotheses to describe the behavior of biological odor tracking systems are proposed.

Adam Rutkowski is a National Research Council postdoctoral associate in the Munitions Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory. He received his B.S. (2001), M.S. (2002), and Ph.D. (2008) in mechanical engineering from Case Western Reserve University.