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Olfactory Inertial Odometry: Sensor Calibration and Drift Compensation

Published: June 5, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2506.04539v1

By: Kordel K. France , Ovidiu Daescu , Anirban Paul and more

Potential Business Impact:

Helps robots find smells accurately, like in surgery.

Business Areas:
Indoor Positioning Navigation and Mapping

Visual inertial odometry (VIO) is a process for fusing visual and kinematic data to understand a machine's state in a navigation task. Olfactory inertial odometry (OIO) is an analog to VIO that fuses signals from gas sensors with inertial data to help a robot navigate by scent. Gas dynamics and environmental factors introduce disturbances into olfactory navigation tasks that can make OIO difficult to facilitate. With our work here, we define a process for calibrating a robot for OIO that generalizes to several olfaction sensor types. Our focus is specifically on calibrating OIO for centimeter-level accuracy in localizing an odor source on a slow-moving robot platform to demonstrate use cases in robotic surgery and touchless security screening. We demonstrate our process for OIO calibration on a real robotic arm and show how this calibration improves performance over a cold-start olfactory navigation task.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
4 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Robotics