RAOS: A Three-dimensional Robot Active Olfaction Simulator

In order to facilitate research on odor source localization or odor plume mapping, a three-dimensional (3D) robot active olfaction simulator (RAOS) is designed. RAOS is mainly designed for the active olfaction research of rotor drones, and also supports the simulation of ground mobile robots. It can mainly simulate 3D scenes, robots, wind fields, odor diffusion and sensors. 3D scenes are generated by computer-aided design software and then imported into the simulator. The free wind field is simulated with a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The wake-induced wind field is calculated based on the aero-olfactory effect model of rotor drone, where a fully-connected network is introduced to approximate the induced wind field, which can improve the real-time calculation. The odor diffusion is simulated by the environmental wind field and the filament diffusion model in CFD. A simplified simulation model is proposed for the tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) sensor. To verify the consistency of the odor diffusion in the simulator and in real environment, two criteria (Frechet distance and the earth mover’s distance) are employed to quantitatively evaluate the similarities of odor diffusion profile and concentration distribution, respectively. Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test is introduced for consistency determination. By comparing with the actual experiment and wind tunnel data, the consistency of the odor plume distribution characteristics between RAOS and real environment is verified, which shows that RAOS can provide a consistent and repeatable simulation platform for the active olfaction research in 3D environments.