Developing a Bio-Inspired 3-D Odor Source Localization

Animals behaviors in odor plumes has been widely studied. They use odors for life important matters such as finding food or mating partners, in competition with each other. Successful bio-inspired algorithms were demonstrated in 2 dimensions. However in 3D, previous studies of our knowledge had to rely on using plumes with either a perfect conic shape, or continuous plumes (no patchiness), which are not realistic plume models. Being able to use a realistic odor plume generator developed at EPFL, I designed a 3D odor localization algorithm, and wrote the corresponding controller in C.