Heuristic Approach on Robot Formation to Find a Gas Leak Source

Abstract

Robots have been widely used to overcome problems in the environment. In this case, mobile robots were used to find the source of gas leakage. Each robot was equipped with gas sensors in the form of a stereo-nose and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). The robot formation in finding the gas leak source had the advantage of expanding the gas detection area, meaning the robots could not easily lose the pathway. However, detecting through formation required a longer execution time. To speed up the robots in finding the gas leak source’s location, this study involved the heuristic model. This model allowed each robot to change positions in a formation. The experiment results showed that the robot group using the heuristic model was 62.2% faster than a single robot. This method was also 19.4% faster than the robot group with a fixed formation.