Evolving Infotaxis for Meandering Environments

Locating odour sources with mobile robots is a difficult task with many real world applications. Over the years, researchers have devised bio-inspired and cognitive methods to enable mobile robots to fulfil this task. One of the most popular cognitive approaches is Infotaxis, which computes a probability map for the location of the chemical source and, on each time step, moves the robot in the direction that minimises the entropy of that probability map. The main difficulty for applying Infotaxis in the real world is selecting proper values for the parameters of its internal gas dispersion model, as it has been shown that its performance is greatly influenced by the accuracy of said model. This work proposes a Genetic Algorithm for optimising those parameters for specific environments. The proposed method is applied to environments with distinct wind and odour dispersion characteristics and the resulting parameters are compared. Moreover, the performance of Infotaxis is compared to that of reactive search strategies evolved by Geometric Syntactic Genetic Programming. The statistically validated results show that the evolved reactive strategies achieve equivalent success rates to Infotaxis, while being significantly faster. Real world experiments conducted in a controlled wind tunnel validated the simulation results.