Airflow Source Seeking on Small Quadrotors Using a Single Flow Sensor

2025-05-19

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of efficiently locating pollutant plume sources using miniature quadrotors, which is hindered by the low sensitivity and slow response of conventional gas sensors. To overcome this limitation, the authors propose a novel approach that integrates airflow-aware sensing with navigation: a custom-designed, gram-scale single-point anemometer capable of simultaneously measuring both wind direction and magnitude is mounted on a sub-100-gram aerial platform. The classic “Cast and Surge” algorithm is enhanced to leverage real-time airflow feedback for source-seeking. This system represents the first demonstration of multimodal plume tracking on an ultra-lightweight quadrotor, reliably localizing the emission source from arbitrary initial positions in experimental trials, thereby establishing a new paradigm for embedded environmental monitoring.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Search

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Location- and context-aware Web and WoT applications and services
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

As environmental disasters happen more frequently and severely, seeking the source of pollutants or harmful particulates using plume tracking becomes even more important. Plume tracking on small quadrotors would allow these systems to operate around humans and fly in more confined spaces, but can be challenging due to poor sensitivity and long response times from gas sensors that fit on small quadrotors. In this work, we present an approach to complement chemical plume tracking with airflow source-seeking behavior using a custom flow sensor that can sense both airflow magnitude and direction on small quadrotors (< 100 g). We use this sensor to implement a modified version of the ‘Cast and Surge’ algorithm that takes advantage of flow direction sensing to find and navigate towards flow sources. A series of characterization experiments verified that the system can detect airflow while in flight and reorient the quadrotor toward the airflow. Several trials with random starting locations and orientations were used to show that our source-seeking algorithm can reliably find a flow source. This work aims to provide a foundation for future platforms that can use flow sensors in concert with other sensors to enable richer plume tracking data collection and source-seeking.

Problem

• plume tracking
• source seeking
• small quadrotors
• gas sensors
• airflow sensing

Innovation

• flow sensor
• source seeking
• quadrotor
• plume tracking
• Cast and Surge algorithm