Tracking Dynamic Source Direction with a Novel Stationary Electronic Nose System

Arrays of chemical sensors, usually called electronic noses (ENose), are widelyused in industry for classifying and identifying odours. They may also be used to locate theposition and detect the direction of an emission source. Usually this task is performed by anENose cooperating with a mobile vehicle, but when a source is instantaneous, or thesurrounding terrain is hard for vehicles to traverse, an alternative approach is needed. Thus athree-step method for a stationary ENose with a novel structure to detect the direction of adynamic source is presented in this paper. The method uses the ratio of measuredconcentration from different sensors (Cn /C1 where n=2, 4) as a discriminator. In addition,this method could easily be adapted to robotics as an optimized algorithm for path trackingto a source location. The paper presents the results of a simulation of the method.