Insect-Inspired Odor Intake Method for Chemical Plume Tracing in an Outdoor Environment

In this study, we propose an insect-inspired odor intake method for carrying out chemical plume tracing (CPT) in an outdoor environment and experimentally investigated the relationship between the intake state and behavioral states of search. Tracking chemical plumes is important because it facilitates the identification of an odor source. Previous studies have focused on the development of CPT algorithms to improve CPT performance. However, there is still inadequate discussion on the effect of the amount of odor acquisition, which is an important factor in determining the state of searching behavior, on CPT performance. To address this issue, we first designed and developed an insect-inspired odor-intake device. To evaluate the performance of the device, we conducted CPT experiments in an outdoor environment. An insect-inspired CPT algorithm that relies only on odor information was adopted because the purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of the odor intake device. As a result of the outdoor CPT experiment, it was found that by setting the appropriate combination of the odor intake state and the behavioral state, certain search performances can be maintained even in highly unpredictable environments, such as outdoors. This suggests that in order to improve the CPT performance, it is important not only to improve the algorithm but also to devise an odor intake method and to combine it with the behavioral state appropriately.