| Jun 20, 2018 |
Robot bloodhound tracks odors on the ground
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(Nanowerk News) Bloodhounds are famous for their ability to track scents over great distances. Now researchers have developed a modern-day bloodhound - a robot that can rapidly detect odors from sources on the ground, such as footprints.
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The robot, reported in ACS Sensors ("A Robot Equipped with a High-Speed LSPR Gas Sensor Module for Collecting Spatial Odor Information from On-Ground Invisible Odor Sources"), could even read a message written on the ground using odors as a barcode.
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| A robot equipped with a high-speed gas sensor module based on localized surface plasmon resonance. (© ACS)
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Over the past two decades, researchers have tried to develop robots that rival the olfactory system of bloodhounds.
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However, most robots can only detect airborne odors, or they are painstakingly slow at performing analyses. Zhongyuan Yang, Fumihiro Sassa and Kenshi Haysashi wanted to develop a robot with a high-speed gas sensor that could rapidly track invisible odor sources on the ground.
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The researchers based their odor sensor on a technique called localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) that measured changes in light absorption by gold nanoparticles upon exposure to a gas. As the robot traveled across a surface, a tube placed close to the ground suctioned odors into the LSPR sensor.
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The researchers showed that the sensor could accurately detect the location of ethanol odor sources placed at different positions along the robot's path, at a travel speed of 10 centimeters/second (about 4 inches/second).
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In addition, the robot could read the word "ODOR" in binary barcode deposited on the ground as a series of ethanol marks at different positions. The robot has great potential in a multi-robot communication system or as a security robot working in an office, the researchers say.
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