Odour Detection By Mobile Robots

Insects are extremely successful creatures, thriving in our ever-changing and unpredictable world. One of the factors behind their success is the use of odour to increase their efficiency when searching for food, to help navigate between a source of food and their nest and to enable them to find a mate. Mobile robots would have their capabilities greatly enhanced if they could make use of similar techniques. This is a description of research aimed at giving robots the ability to generate, detect and discriminate between odours, together with the control algorithms using such sensory information.