2274
2, APRIL 2022
Autonomous Source Term Estimation in Unknown
Environments: From a Dual Control Concept to
UAV Deployment
Callum Rhodes , Cunjia Liu , Member, IEEE, and Wen-Hua Chen , Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—In the gas source search and localisation problem,
the use of autonomous robots is of increasing interest due to their
deployment speed and lack of human interaction with hazardous
materials. This letter presents an aerial robotic platform for per-
forming source term estimation of an unknown chemical release in
a challenging a-priori unknown and GPS-denied environment. The
proposed system forms the search strategy using the state-of-the-art
control concept, dual control for exploitation and exploration, and
realises such a function in the aforementioned challenging scenario
using an RRT* based path planner. A novel downsampling process
on the RRT* is also proposed that addresses the computational
infeasibility of calculating the utility of a large number of sample
states, whilst still maintaining sample state diversity. The proposed
algorithm is tested in a high fidelity simulation environment un-
der a number of configurations, and compared against competing
algorithms. The system architecture is also brought forward into
a bespoke UAV platform and experimentally tested in real-world
conditions. The proposed system is shown to be capable of perform-
ing source term estimation robustly and efficiently, which provides
a step forward in showing the real world application of previously
academic functions.
Index Terms—Robotics in hazardous fields, sensor-based
control, planning under uncertainty.
I. INTRODUCTION
IRBORNE chemical releases are an ongoing threat both in
A defence and industrial applications. The ability to manage
these situations quickly and in a stand-off manner is required
to mitigate the risk to the surrounding area and to protect
human lives. A prime example where first response robotics
were of vital importance was during the Fukushima nuclear
power plant disaster in 2011 [1]. Whilst remote intervention is
currently required to deal with chemical, biological, radiological
and nuclear (CBRN) events, it is imperative that future work
focus on making these systems autonomous so that they can be
deployed as quickly as possible with little expertise. Due to these
growing concerns, and the development of small unmanned
Manuscript received September 9, 2021; accepted January 3, 2022. Date of
publication January 19, 2022; date of current version January 25, 2022. This
letter was recommended for publication by Associate Editor H. Ryu and Editor
Y. Choi upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported
in part by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under
Project 2126619 and in part by EPSRC Established Career Fellowship to Wen-
Hua Chen under Grant EP/T005734/1. (Corresponding author: Cunjia Liu.)
The authors are with the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive En-
gineering, Loughborough University, LE11 3TU Loughborough, U.K. (e-mail:
c.rhodes@lboro.ac.uk; c.liu5@lboro.ac.uk; w.chen@lboro.ac.uk).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LRA.2022.3143890
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IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS, VOL. 7, NO.
aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms, there is growing interest from
both academia and industry into how to develop an autonomous
source search platform that is capable of operating in a wide
range of environments.
Due to the requirement of robust operation in varying con-
ditions, there is gain to be had in the development of small yet
computationally powerful drones. Whilst micro-drones have the
advantage of being able to operate in very tight spaces, they lack
the computational power to be able to execute intelligent and
robust searching, limiting their applicability only to small scale
searches. On the contrary, large UAVs have the advantage of long
flight times and the ability to deploy large sensors. However,
for gas source localisation the propeller interference with the
plume can cause sampling issues [2] and they are limited to large
open environments. Based on this understanding, there exists
a convergence wherein an autonomous UAV has the smallest
footprint possible and has the computational and physical power
required to perform robust and efficient autonomous search
in unknown environments. This is something we wish to also
address in our work with a new compact platform.
A. Related Work
In recent years, the number of published works for chemical
sensing using a small drone has increased from less than 5 papers
per year in 2010 to over 30 in 2020 [3]. This dramatic increase
in research has coincided with the commercial development of
drone platforms in other sectors, which has led to more accessi-
ble and a wider range of platforms for use within a CBRN setting.
An excellent review of the field of environmental chemical
sensing using small drones by Burgues et al. [3] can be read for
a more in-depth analysis (particularly on the chemical sensing
side). One area that has had less consideration is how to achieve
fully autonomous chemical sensing within varied environments,
since most research has only been proven to perform in more
controlled situations (e.g. not considering operation in a-priori
unknown and GPS-denied environments).
In this paper we adopt a source term estimation (STE) frame-
work [4] for estimating the unknown source and focus on the
path planning of the system to achieve our goals (making use of
state of the art functions for the other aspects). The literature
concerning motion planning for gas source localisation has
generally only been concerned with goal selection, i.e. the next
best place to take a chemical sample. This has been approached
in two ways: bio-inspired methods and information theoretic
RHODES et al.: ASTE IN UNKNOWN ENVIRONMENTS: FROM A DUAL CONTROL CONCEPT TO UAV DEPLOYMENT
methods. Bio-inspired methods such as anemotaxis [5] and
chemotaxis [6], [7] seek environmental gradients in order to
dictate upstream travel. Due to their computational simplicity,
these algorithms are often deployed for swarm robotics where
computational resources are limited. A state-of-the-art example
of a bio-inspired method can be found in [8]. Information
theoretic strategies attempt to optimise the information gain,
which is used to quantify the uncertainties in STE inference,
when choosing the next sampling location. Infotaxis [9], [10]
and Entrotaxis [11] are two information theoretic strategies for
directing an autonomous agent.
A recent development in the area of the goal-oriented con-
trol, namely dual control for exploitation and exploration
(DCEE) [12], provides a hybrid strategy that jointly optimises
the exploitative aspects of bio-inspired methods, which drives
the robot towards the source, and the exploratory nature of in-
formation theoretic methods, which maximises the information
gain, into a unified utility function. This new technique provides
a promising direction for source localisation problems and is
leveraged in our proposed system.
Whilst these strategies provide high level goals, they do not
take into account the geometry or traversibility of the problem.
Some examples such as [13], [14] do consider this aspect, but
are myopic in their search and are not proven in larger scenarios.
To address this, our recent work [15] proposes an information
theoretic path planning technique using BIT* [16], with an
informed trajectory generation towards the expected source term
location. This work assumes a known map and therefore long
term trajectories could reasonably be planned. However, for an
unknown map, this is not feasible until the majority of an area
has been covered.
Furthermore, taking a large network of trajectories and re-
ducing the sample space to allow timely computation of their
utility for STE is non-trivial and must be addressed in an
information-theoretic framework.
B. Contributions
Given the shortfalls in the literature, this paper provides a new
system architecture that is capable of performing STE in GPS-
denied and a-priori unknown environments. The contributions
to the field of CBRN robotics are as follows.
Firstly, we design a novel path planning solution to realise the
DCEE search strategy in cluttered environments. Comparing to
existing search strategies that use a pre-determined set of sam-
pling actions (e.g. [10]–[13]), the proposed method combines
rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT*) and a new downsampling
process that can adapt to the environment and accommodate
computation resources.
Secondly, we form a high fidelity simulation environment,
which can test the perception function, gas sensing capability
and robotic control simultaneously. We also make the simulation
setup available for benchmarking and future research.1
Thirdly, on the practical side, we develop a UAV platform
with an onboard perception system that allows STE operation
1 The industrial scenario (CAD, CFD, and dispersion data) for use in GADEN
is [Online]. Available: https://github.com/callum-rhodes/GADEN_industrial_
env
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2275
under the proposed architecture. Using the developed platform,
several real-world tests are undertaken that prove its efficacy and
to the best of the authors knowledge, this is the first UAV system
to perform GPS denied STE in an unknown environment.
II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
A. System Requirements
In order to design the architecture of the platform, it is
prudent to consider the features that are required to successfully
perform autonomous STE in unknown environments. Since the
robotic platform may be deployed in hazardous areas that are
inaccessible to an unmanned ground vehicle, a UAV may be
more suited to these kind of applications. However, by selecting
a UAV platform, more careful considerations must be taken for
the onboard compute unit and the perception suite due to the
payload limit and UAV dynamics.
For UAVs operating in unknown and cluttered environments,
the lightweight solution of leveraging vision sensors to perform
localisation and mapping is preferred. A stereo-inertial camera is
thus adopted since it has the ability to perform robust simultane-
ous localisation and mapping (SLAM) to support UAV flight by
fusing odometry from the onboard IMU with pose estimation
from the image data. In addition, the vision system generates
the traversability map to enable collision avoidance, where any
inaccuracy may render the platform inoperable.
Another key component of the platform is the autonomous
search or sampling function. For a maximum take-off mass of
<2.5 kg, reasonably powerful compute units are available to
perform online inference of STE and therefore we do not have
to rely on reactive methods e.g. anemotaxis and chemotaxis.
This extra compute power over micro-drones allows the use of
more robust information-theoretic approaches based on STE,
but how to generate effective and feasible search strategies is
still an open problem.
To fulfill the system requirements, a new system architecture
is developed in this paper as shown in Fig. 1. The diagram sum-
marises the various functions and their dependencies required
to deliver an effective and reliable autonomous STE based on
a UAV. The technical aspects of each function are explained as
follows.
B. Localisation and Mapping
For small payload UAVs, an ongoing area of research is
how to reliably and accurately perform real-time localisation
without relying on computationally expensive algorithms or
offboard sensors. Campos et al. [17] overview many prominent
attempts to this end but the trade off between compute power
and the systems reliability, scale and accuracy, is still a choice
that is application specific. In this work, we consider an open
source state-of-the-art stereo-inertial SLAM method, namely
ORB-SLAM3 [17], which uses ORB features [18] in the stereo
pair of images to calculate real time trajectories in a sparse map.
ORB-SLAM has shown to be capable of tracking in 100m+
scale environments and therefore can suitably be applied to
a CBRN scenario which exhibits similar scales. ORB-SLAM
is also computationally lightweight, however, the sparse map
2276
Fig. 1. System diagram for the proposed chemical sensing UAV platform.
representation means that a dense local mapping layer must
be employed on top of ORB-SLAM in order to plan valid
trajectories through cluttered environments (i.e. mapping with
known poses). The Octomap [19] voxel grid representation of
the environment is chosen due to its efficiency of storing such
dense 3D maps. The UAV pose (denoted by xk ) and the 3D
map mk are subsequently incorporated in the path generation
process.
C. Source Term Estimation
STE seeks to calculate the model parameters of a source
release by recursively updating a belief state of the source
with new sensor measurements as the platform explores the
environment. Unlike source localisation wherein only the source
location, s ⊂ R3 , is concerned, STE also estimates other plume
parameters, such as release rate, diffusivity and wind parameters,
denoted as Θ. Casting the estimation problem into a Bayesian
inference framework makes it more robust to unknown envi-
ronmental factors and scalable to different scenarios. This is a
proven technique for achieving gas source localisation, as the
efficacy and applicability to real world STE scenarios have been
shown in [20], [21].
In this work, we use the inference engine from [21], [22],
where an isotropic plume model [23] with the source state
vector Θ = [sT , qs , us , φs , ζ1 , ζ2 ]T , denoting for the source lo-
cation, release rate, wind strength, wind direction, diffusivity,
respectively, is adapted. The particle filter solution uses an
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) step to improve the nu-
merical stability and contains Npf number of weighted particles
(i) (i) Npf (i)
{Θk , wk }i=1 , with wk referring to the normalised weight-
ing of the ith particle at time k. The STE inference engine
provides the posterior probability of the source term p(Θ|Zk ),
given the gas sensor measurements up to time k, denoted as
Zk := {z1 , z2 , . . . , zk }.
With the localisation, mapping and STE functions onboard,
the remaining function to be developed is the autonomous search
strategy, so that the system can determine the next sampling
location in an optimal way and plan a safe path to reach there.
The flight controller on the UAV is then employed to drive the
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IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS, VOL. 7, NO. 2, APRIL 2022
UAV to the next sampling location and the whole process can
be iterated until the source can be identified.
III. AUTONOMOUS SEARCH STRATEGY
For a UAV platform performing autonomous STE in an un-
known environment, it is inherently required that the system
is capable of self-dictating the sampling locations online by
incorporating the latest understanding of environment and the
belief of the source term. While the common approach to make
an informed sampling decision is to maximise an information
theoretic utility function, this does not accommodate the obsta-
cles in the environment. Starting from the state-of-the-art DCEE
utility function, this section outlines how the search strategy
can evolve to account for obstacles by utilising RRT* based
trajectory generation to improve system efficacy. The method
for interfacing these two separate algorithms is also explained
by way of a binary tree set partitioning technique.
A. DCEE Utility Function
Different from existing informative path planning methods to
maximise a measure of information gain, the DCEE formulation
offers an optimal trade-off between the objectives of driving the
platform to the source location and reducing the uncertainties in
the estimation process. The DCEE enabled autonomous search-
ing strategy is formulated in this section.
Consider the current UAV position in the search space, xk ∈
X and denote σkk+1 : [0, 1] → X a collision-free path that can
be followed by the UAV to reach to the next sampling location
xk+1 . Autonomous searching can be realised by optimising a
utility function J(σkk+1 ) that captures the benefit from such a
move.
In STE, given an unknown source term Θ, a probability
density function ρk|k := p(Θ|Zk ) can be used to represent the
belief of Θ at time k, conditioned on sensor measurements Zk . A
candidate path σkk+1 , that leads the UAV to a potential sampling
location xk+1|k would give a future new measurement ẑk+1
(where ẑ distinguishes a predicted variable from a real variable).
A hypothetical posterior distribution ρ̂k+1|k := p(Θ|Zk , ẑk+1 )
RHODES et al.: ASTE IN UNKNOWN ENVIRONMENTS: FROM A DUAL CONTROL CONCEPT TO UAV DEPLOYMENT
conditioned on this possible future measurement ẑk+1 can be
calculated by running the predictive inference.
In this case, the DCEE utility function for reaching an un-
known source s can be formulated as
  
J(σkk+1 ) = Eẑk+1 EΘ xk+1|k − s2 |Zk , ẑk+1 (1)
From this, the predicted source location s̄k+1|k is defined as the
expectation over the distribution ρ̂k+1|k , such that
   
s̄k+1|k := E sk+1|k = E s|Zk+1|k (2)
where Zk+1|k := {Zk , ẑk+1 }. With s̄k+1|k , an error variable
s̃k+1|k = s − s̄k+1|k , conditioned on Zk+1|k , can be defined.
Based on the above notation, the DCEE reward function can
be simplified into the following expression, for which a full
derivation and proof can be found in [12].
J(σkk+1 ) = xk+1|k − s̄k+1|k 2 + Pk+1|k
where Pk+1|k = EΘ,ẑk+1 [s̃Tk+1|k s̃k+1|k |Zk+1|k ] is the predicted
covariance matrix of sk+1|k .
Equation (3) shows the exploitation (left) and exploration
(right) that are jointly optimised and this provides the spine of
our decision making system.
B. Trajectory Generation
Although DCEE provides a nice framework for designing the
utility function to evaluate a candidate path σkk+1 , it is still an
open problem how to find a set of candidate paths for the UAV
in a cluttered environment. The trajectory generation function
thus seeks to navigate the platform through the mapped envi-
ronment whilst avoiding any obstacles. Trajectory generation
is inherently tied to the utility function, in which the potential
location xk+1|k evaluated by the utility function must first be
accessible; but equally, it can be said that the sampling location
should first be determined, followed by the construction of an
obstacle-free path to reach it. In our case, it is argued that the
former case is preferable, since evaluating the utility function
is much more computationally costly. Also, due to sensor con-
straints and one-step sampling, the maximum likely travel cost
is low, which constrains the searching process to be in the UAVs
local area and therefore allows an initial undirected search to be
computationally feasible.
Let Σ be the set of non-trivial collision-free paths to be
constructed. The search problem is then formally defined as
finding, σ ∗ ∈ Σ, that minimises the DCEE utility function J(·),
such that
σ ∗ := arg min{J(σ)|σ(0) = xk }
σ∈Σ
To establish the set Σ needed for the search problem, we first
employ the popular RRT* method to generate our candidate
trajectories in the environment map generated by the perception
system, which can also be extended to RT-RRT* [24] for use
in dynamic environments. RRT* has the benefit of being fast to
generate paths but as stated in [16], is slow to converge to the
optimal solution. For our application this is not an issue, since
we are concerned with quickly generating exploratory sample
locations within the computational budget. To this end, we then
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2277
design a downsampling process to select a suitable number of
sampling locations that are more spatially uniformly distributed.
(3) Algorithm 1 describes how the RRT* algorithm has been
integrated with the DCEE framework for the STE procedure.
For full derivation and primitive function descriptions of the
RRT* procedure, please refer to Karaman et al. [25].
Given X ⊂ R3 is the state space of STE problem, let Xobs ⊂
X be the states which are obstacles, and the set of obstacle
free states defined as Xfree := X \ Xobs . Xfree and Xobs are
typically obtained from an occupancy grid or octomap, mk .
First, the RRT* tree consisting of vertices and edges, τ (V, E),
is grown as per [25], except for only sampling from within
a defined region. Due to the range limitations of the sensor
configuration, this maximum search volume is set to a sphere
of radius equal to the maximum range of the stereo camera
rvisible , around the UAVs current position xk . Since the UAV
cannot ‘see’ beyond this region, this search heuristic is used to
avoid wasteful exploration beyond this boundary. The maximum
number of nodes in the tree Nrrt , and the step size, rstep taken
towards each sample in the steer function, are defined based on
expected environmental characteristics, e.g. the size of obstacles
expected to be traversed and the size of the maximum search
volume. An example of the fully grown RRT* tree is shown in
Fig. 2.
C. Candidate Resampling
Given the tree growing criteria have been met, a set of can-
didate trajectories Σ, need to be extracted to pass to the DCEE
reward function. Based on the geometry of the scenario, the
UAV should move a minimum set distance between sampling
events (sample heuristic), denoted rsample ∈ (rstep , rvisible ), in
order to provide good coverage of the search area within the
(4) time budget. Based on this notion, any nodes of the tree that
have an associated cost ≥ rsample , are possible sampling loca-
tions to be considered. However, the RRT* procedure generates
orders of magnitude more nodes than DCEE can evaluate for
online computation. To overcome this issue, and to formally
merge RRT* with DCEE, we must downsample the tree τ to
meet the requirement |Σ| = Ndcee , where Ndcee  Nrrt . The
requirements for downsampling are that the samples should be
drawn from admissible vertices in τ (V), but also be peripherally
sampled about xk upon this distribution (to give DCEE diversity
of travel directions to evaluate). To achieve this, we employ
2278
Fig. 2. RRT* undirected trajectory generation across a cluttered area. The large blue cross marks the UAV position xk , with τ (V, E) shown with green edges
and small blue x nodes grown within the search boundary of rvisible . Binary tree set partitioning (centre) of the tree is shown with each coloured region depicting
a leaf node of the binary tree. The downsampled set Vdcee is shown with yellow circles (one per region) and σ ∗ (1) ⊂ Vdcee is shown with a magenta circle. An
example traversal through the scenario is shown on the far right figure.
a binary tree set partitioning technique wherein each node of
the tree contains a subset of its parent node (Algorithm 1,
Line 8). The binary tree is initialised with V and then split
recursively until the number of leaf nodes in the binary tree
equals Ndcee . At each recursion, the set of highest cardinality is
bisected radially into two child nodes increasing the number of
leaf nodes in the binary tree by one. If a node is an empty set
after bisection, then this node is discarded (an empty set defines
non-traversable regions). After partitioning, the following vertex
sets are established:
{Vleaf }N
(i)
i=1 ⊆ V
dcee
Once Ndcee number of sets have been established, one random
(i)
vertex from each set Vleaf is selected and added to Vdcee ⊂ V.
Vdcee can then be traced through τ to give the set of trajectories
Σ (Algorithm 1, Line 9). With this method, a set of candidate
sampling locations, drawn in a spatially even fashion from the
distribution of V, is guaranteed and applies to both the 2D and
3D cases. An example partitioning and subsequent sample draw
is shown in Fig. 2.
Given a set of traversable trajectories in Σ, σ ∗ is calculated
as per (4). Since we assume stationary gas sampling and that no
data is collected while travelling, J(σ) ≡ J(σ(1)), where σ(1)
is the end point of the trajectory.
With the acquisition of σ ∗ this section has now outlined the
environment aware search strategy block of Fig. 1 which in then
in-turn passed to the flight controller for execution.
IV. SIMULATION STUDY
Having firstly described the system architecture for the plat-
form, and then developed a new search strategy to address
GPS-denied a-priori unknown environments, the framework and
algorithm must be quantitatively tested to prove its efficacy
over current state-of-the-art methods. Realistic experiments for
CBRN scenarios are challenging to make. It is difficult to
recreate the type of industrial scenarios commonly associated
with CBRN problems, notwithstanding the difficulty involved in
dealing with hazardous substance releases. In order to overcome
this issue, it is important to test algorithms in high fidelity
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IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS, VOL. 7, NO. 2, APRIL 2022
simulation scenarios to show real world applicability. In recent
years, the GADEN 3D filament dispersion simulator has been
developed by Monroy et al. [26] to address this issue. The
simulator uses the principles of computational fluid dynamics
(CFD) and filament dispersion theory in order to model gas
dispersion in 3D environments and is available as an open source
robot operating system (ROS) package. GADEN is capable
of showing basic visualisation and chemical sensor data but
is not in itself an environmental simulator. This shortcoming
has been addressed by Ojeda et al. in [27] by incorporating
GADEN data into the Unity graphics engine. However, we opt
(5)
to use the popular Gazebo robot simulation software for ROS.
Gazebo is also capable of graphically realistic scenarios and has
wide support for a variety of robot models and sensors. More
importantly for our application, the PX4 autopilot (used on our
physical platform) has full integration in the Gazebo environ-
ment and therefore we can specifically model our platform in
the simulation study.
A. Scenario Setup
To test the proposed system, a mock industrial scenario is
built that contains large buildings, randomly placed shipping
containers and oil drums (see Fig. 3). Ten different configura-
tions are tested within our mock scenario which include two
source settings and five UAV start locations. This is to show the
flexibility and robustness of our system. For comparison (and
to reinforce the findings in [12]), basic Entrotaxis and original
DCEE are tested with no path planning additions (i.e. must have
line of sight to the next sample) to demonstrate the requirement
for path planning integration in cluttered environments.
In Section III-A, we describe how to obtain traversable sam-
pling trajectories Σ by constructing the RRT* tree followed by a
downsampling process. In the simulation, we select Ndcee = 10
trajectories within the sphere of rsample = 5 m. A larger or
smaller selection of trajectories can be made based on compu-
tational resources available. The evaluation of sampling trajec-
tories can also be made parallel. For the particle filter, the same
distributions as in [15] are deployed around the scenario ground
truth values. Other simulation parameters are shown in Table I.
RHODES et al.: ASTE IN UNKNOWN ENVIRONMENTS: FROM A DUAL CONTROL CONCEPT TO UAV DEPLOYMENT 2279

Fig. 3. Left: Birds eye view of the 100 m × 100 m industrial environment in Gazebo. Source 1 filament dispersion is shown with blue particles and source 2
dispersion is shown with red particles. Base of each green arrow depicts the respective source location with its direction indicating the CFD inlet wind direction. ×1
to ×5 denote five starting locations tested for each of the two sources. Right: An example RViz output during a simulation run. Octomap shows the coloured voxels
and the occupancy grid from which path planning is calculated. Large green arrow depicts anemometry sensor reading and large red arrow depicts the forward
vector of the UAV. An image from the simulated stereo camera is shown in the bottom right corner.

TABLE I TABLE II
SIMULATION PARAMETERS SIMULATION RESULTS

B. Results
Table II shows the results from the simulations averaged for
each configuration (20 runs per configuration). The common
STE performance metrics of success rate (SR) (%) and the mean
search time (MST) (of the successful runs in seconds) are used.
The source is deemed to have been successfully estimated when
the weighted root mean square error (RMSE) of the particle filter
(6) is < 10 m of the true source location in the first instance.

n (i) (k)
RMSEk = i=1 wk (Θs − s)
2 (6)

Fig. 4 also shows the RMSE averaged across all configurations

for each algorithm.
Analysing Table II, it can be seen that the proposed DCEE
strategy with a dedicated path planner is capable of estimating
the source term in 91% of runs. Comparing this with simple
DCEE, which only fully estimated the source in 57% of cases, Fig. 4. RMSE over time, for each control method averaged across all simu-
the benefit of our system in the case of unknown cluttered lations for all source configurations. One standard deviation bounds from the
mean are shown in the corresponding mean line colour.
environments is clear. As both these methods use DCEE as the

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2280
Fig. 5. Autonomous STE platform (left). Warehouse scenario Octomap built using ORB-SLAM3 (centre). Shown right, two trajectories from testing overlayed
onto the corresponding occupancy grid map. Blue circle shows the UAV starting location with the red line indicating its trajectories. Blue x indicates the UAVs
final location after convergence of the expected source location, s̄k+1|k (green circle). Red x shows the true source location.
core search strategy, they predictably exhibit very similar MST
across successful runs. Entrotaxis averaged 54% SR, slightly
lower than DCEE and with with a much slower MST, thus
furthering the findings of [12] that DCEE is more efficient
than Entrotaxis for STE. It should also be noted that there are
particular challenging configurations for original DCEE, but the
performance of the proposed method is very consistent across
the board.
By studying the RMSE over time in Fig. 4, the efficiency and
variance of each strategy can be appreciated over all runs. En-
trotaxis converges very slowly and also has the largest variance
across the simulation time. Standard DCEE and our proposed
algorithm initially have similarly quick convergence, but DCEE
shows an average terminal RMSE of 18.5 m compared to 6.2 m
of our proposed system. Whilst DCEE shows the quickest MST
in several configurations, since only line of sight samples are
considered, the executed trajectories are simpler and generally
shorter per sample than our proposed algorithm (in addition
to a small reduction in computational complexity). However,
not considering path planning means that DCEE (as well as
Entrotaxis) can only use a fixed step size and can get stuck in
situations where its visible options are significantly reduced.
This is shown with a large variance on Fig. 4. On the contrary,
the proposed DCEE with a new path planner exhibits narrower
variance with a converged RMSE obtained at around 20 mins.
V. EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION
A. Platform and Scenario
One of the main contributions of this paper is to demonstrate
a real-world UAV platform performing STE in a GPS-denied
environment. To test the proposed system architecture, we have
developed a quadrotor based on a 450 mm wheelbase airframe
to facilitate operations in difficult to navigate areas. We combine
this airframe with a PX4 autopilot to handle low level control.
For the perception system, a Mynteye S210 stereo-inertial cam-
era is used which has an 8 cm baseline and can be integrated
with ORB-SLAM3 to perform SLAM, as well as generating the
pointcloud from which the Octomap is built. An Intel i7 NUC
is used as the compute unit due to its small form factor and high
processing power. Finally, an Alphasense PID-AH2 sensor is
used for concentration readings which provides response times
of <3 seconds and measures volatile organic compounds in the
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IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS, VOL. 7, NO. 2, APRIL 2022
ppb range. The autonomous STE platform is shown in Fig. 5
with a GPS antenna as we expect the platform to operate in GPS
and non-GPS denied environments, fusing GPS data with the
vision system when available. However, since GPS driven STE
has been proven in [21], we specifically test the new platform
in a GPS-denied environment, a new frontier for autonomous
STE.
For the test area, we use a warehouse scenario with shelves
and random obstacles placed in a search corridor. The source is
a container of acetone that is agitated using a small fan placed
at ∼ 2 m above ground level. Several obstacles that must be
mapped and navigated include, pallets, boxes and shelving units
with a varying degree of clutter. Given this scenario, the UAV
is tasked with navigating the a-prior unknown scenario and
simultaneously performing robust SLAM, dense 3D mapping
and finding the source location autonomously. General UAV
parameters carry over from Table I with the exception that
tbudget = 10 mins and rsample = 1.5 m due to the decreased
area of operation and the need for finer resolution in resolving
the source.
B. Results
Fig. 5 (centre) shows the 3D Octomap voxel grid and the
flanking shelving units with pieces of clutter in the sampling
corridor. Shown right are two example trajectories after STE has
been completed (defined when the source location is resolved
with RMSE <2 m, as per (6)). In an unknown search without
ground truth data, this can be defined as when the spread of
the posterior PDF has converged as per [10]. The weighted
mean source location, s̄k , is shown by the green circle and has
converged to within 0.5 m of the true source location for both
trials. The average time for the UAV to converge the source
location within the 180 m2 search area is 238 seconds, well
within the flight budget of 600 seconds. The trajectories clearly
demonstrate the initial exploitative effects of DCEE wherein the
UAV quickly towards the source and then samples laterally in
the later stages to converge the source location to the ground
truth value.
To the best of the authors knowledge, this paper is the first
working example of autonomous STE with a UAV in a GPS-
denied environment, and this experiment shows working proof
of our proposed algorithm in the real world.
RHODES et al.: ASTE IN UNKNOWN ENVIRONMENTS: FROM A DUAL CONTROL CONCEPT TO UAV DEPLOYMENT
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper we examine how to successfully operate a
chemical source searching UAV in a GPS-denied a-priori un-
known environment. To achieve this goal, we propose a new
system architecture consisting of: a perception system to provide
localisation and mapping, STE using a particle filter to estimate
the parameters of the plume model and a dedicated informative
path planning solution to effectively construct the sampling tra-
jectories in the perceived environment. We quantitatively assess
the proposed system in a high fidelity simulation framework.
The proposed algorithm is benchmarked against the latest DCEE
and classic Entrotaxis methods and is shown to have much more
reliable performance in the cluttered environment with better
STE convergence.
At last, we deploy the proposed system architecture to the be-
spoke UAV platform to demonstrate the real-world performance.
The platform is shown to successfully perform online SLAM
and localise the acetone source, whilst avoiding collision with
any obstacles in a warehouse environment. The results from this
paper are encouraging and show that the proposed system archi-
tecture has the potential to play an important role in real-world
CBRN scenarios. In the future, we wish to further develop our
platform to tackle more challenging scenarios at larger scales and
higher degrees of clutter by enhancing the perception system
and developing more efficient and perception-aware sampling
actions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Defence Science and
Technology Laboratory (DSTL) for advising on the platform
and use case scenarios.
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