title: Environmental monitoring using autonomous vehicles: a survey of recent searching techniques.
abstract: Autonomous vehicles are becoming an essential tool in a wide range of environmental applications that include ambient data acquisition, remote sensing, and mapping of the spatial extent of pollutant spills. Among these applications, pollution source localization has drawn increasing interest due to its scientific and commercial interest and the emergence of a new breed of robotic vehicles capable of operating in harsh environments without human supervision. The aim is to find the location of a region that is the source of a given substance of interest (e.g. a chemical pollutant at sea or a gas leakage in air) using a group of cooperative autonomous vehicles. Motivated by fast paced advances in this challenging area, this paper surveys recent advances in searching techniques that are at the core of environmental monitoring strategies using autonomous vehicles.
authors.affiliation: Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob), Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. Electronic address: behzad.bayat@epfl.ch.
authors.forename: Behzad
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bayat
authors.affiliation: Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal.
authors.forename: Naveena
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Crasta
authors.affiliation: Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob), Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Crespi
authors.affiliation: Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal.
authors.forename: António M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Pascoal
authors.affiliation: Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob), Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Auke
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ijspeert
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D004787:Environmental Pollution / Q000032:analysis*; D012371:Robotics