Remote Drone-to-Drone Gas Sensing: A Feasibility Study

Abstract

Remote gas sensors mounted on mobile robots en-able the mapping of gas distributions in large or poorly accessible areas. A challenging task however, is the generation of three-dimensional distribution maps from these spatially sparse gas measurements. To obtain high-quality reconstructions, the choice of optimal measuring poses is of great importance. Remote gas sensors, that are commonly used in Robot Assisted Gas Tomogra-phy (RAGT), require reflecting surfaces within the sensor's range, limiting the possible sensing geometries, regardless of whether the robots are ground-based or airborne. By combining ground and aerial robots into a heterogeneous swarm whose agents are equipped with reflectors and remote gas sensors, remote inter-robot gas measurements become available, taking RAGT to the next dimension - releasing those constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of drone-to-drone measurements under realistic conditions and highlight the resulting opportunities.