A Fleet of Chemical Plume Tracers with the Distributed Architecture Built upon DaNI Robots

This paper presents a fleet of chemical plume tracers with the distributed architecture developed at California State University, Bakersfield CSUB. Each chemical plume tracer built upon a DaNI robot integrates multiple sensors, including a wind sensor, chemical sensors, a wireless router, and a network camera. The DaNI robot is an advanced platform embedded with a single control board sbRIO-9632, consisting of a 400 MHz industrial processor, a 2M gate Xilinx Spartan FPGA, and a variety of I/Os. In order demonstrate the feasibility of the designed chemical plume tracers, the experiments on moth-inspired plume tracing are conducted under the turbulent airflow environment. This fleet of chemical plume tracers is a powerful tool for investigating algorithms for the tracking and mapping of chemical plumes via swarm intelligence.