Robotics and Autonomous Systems 113 (2019) 1–9 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Robotics and Autonomous Systems journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/robot Olfactory telerobotics. A feasible solution for teleoperated localization of gas sources? ✩ Andres Gongora *,1 , Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez 1 University of Malaga, Boulevard Louis Pasteur 35, Lab. 2.3.6, Malaga 29071, Spain article info Article history: Received 10 August 2018 Received in revised form 24 October 2018 Accepted 14 December 2018 Available online 26 December 2018 Keywords: Mobile robotics Telerobotics Artificial olfaction Gas source localization Electronic nose abstract Olfactory telerobotics consists in augmenting the sensing capabilities of a conventional teleoperated mobile-robot to acquire information about the surrounding air (i.e. smell, wind-speed, etc.) in addition to the usual audio and video streams. Conceptually, this allows for new and improved applications, among which the most relevant are those related to gas-source localization (GSL). That is, searching through telerobotics for one or multiple gas-emission sources, such as hazardous gas-leaks in industrial facilities or the CO2 signature of trapped survivors in collapsed buildings. Notwithstanding, both the needed sensing-technology for the robot as well as the olfactory feedback-interfaces for the human operator are relatively recent, and might still not meet all the requirements of such applications. This work is therefore meant to assess the current feasibility of olfactory telerobotics to address real-world GSL problems, and accordingly, to determine which aspects play the most important role for its success, or otherwise, might be constraining its usefulness. We have collected to this end a dataset composed of 60 experiments where volunteer operators had to locate and identify hidden gas-source among several identical candidates with an olfaction-enabled robot and under realistic environmental conditions (i.e. uncontrolled and natural gas-distributions). We analyse this data to determine the overall search accuracy and intuitiveness of the system, considering that none of the operators had any prior experience with it, and study the importance of the employed sensory-feedback and how they were employed during the experiments. We finally report different findings, from which we highlight that the tested telerobotics system allowed the operators to correctly identify the source in 3 out of 4 attempts, and that the underlying human search- strategy appears to be a probabilistic-driven behaviour that favours semantic and visual information over the robot’s gas and wind measurements. © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Teleoperation of mobile robots, also known as telerobotics, is the remote operation of a robot to perceive and interact with the world at a distance [1]. Its most prominent applications are typically those related to safety [2], as they involve conditions that are dangerous or limiting for humans, yet require of a higher de- gree of reliability than that offered by fully-autonomous systems. For example, accessing difficult to reach sites (e.g rescue missions in collapsed buildings [3]), working in hazardous environments (e.g. emergency response to nuclear accidents [4]), or manipulating unsafe material (e.g. remote bomb disarming [5]). ✩ This work has been funded by the Governments of Spain and Andalusia, and the European Regional Development Fund under project TEP530. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: andresgongora@uma.es (A. Gongora), javiergonzalez@uma.es (J. Gonzalez-Jimenez). 1 Authors are with the Machine Perception and Intelligent Robotics (MAPIR) research group, and the Biomedical Research Institute of Malaga (IBIMA), at the University of Malaga, Spain. However, the situations for which telerobotics may indeed prove feasible are limited, aside from other factors, by the robot’s sensing capabilities [6]. While it usually suffices to have access to video, audio or haptic feedback, some applications may also require of additional and specialized sensors to be effective. Such is the case of olfactory telerobotics, where the robot needs to somehow acquire and convey information about the surrounding air to address smell or gas-related tasks; like searching for gas- leaks of dangerous chemicals (e.g. toxic or highly flammable) or tracing smoke-plumes to their origin (e.g. firefighting). This work aims to apply olfactory telerobotics to gas source localization (GSL) problems like the ones above. Although they are one of the most relevant challenges in general olfactory robotics [7], they have only been approach with autonomous mobile-robots in an attempt to automate the search process. Yet due to the still limited capabilities of autonomous robots and the complex- ity of the task at hand [8], most works in this field have only been validated under very simplistic conditions (i.e. unidirectional and laminar wind fields [9,10], absence of obstacles in the en- vironment [11,12], etc.) As such, a teleoperation approach that https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2018.12.008 0921-8890/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.