Chemical Source Location and the RoboMole Project

There are important economic and humanitarian applications for systems that can find the source of an odour or volatile chemical buried under the ground. These applications cover the spectrum from harvesting truffles, to finding the location of leaking gas pipes and land mines. This paper presents current progress of the RoboMole project which aims to develop robotic systems that can burrow through the ground and home-in on chemical sources. The current emphasis of the project is to prove the feasibility of the concept and to develop a suitable robot control algorithm. This paper reports on investigations of chemical vapour transport through soil, development of a robotic chemical source location algorithm and results of practical source location experiments. Proposed future directions for the RoboMole project are outlined.