Tutorial on robotic olfaction via gas-sensitive UAV: technologies and methodologies

When used in a wide range of environments for sniffing tasks, gas-sensitive drones will perform better than common ground-based mobile robots due to their flexibility. In recent years, with the improvement of various related theories, gas-sensitive unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has gradually become a hot research direction. Generally speaking, gas-sensitive UAV platform consists of electronic nose and commercial UAV, which can be divided into different application directions according to the configuration of electronic nose module. The research on its application mainly focuses on gas localisation and gas distribution mapping. In this paper, the design and application of gas-sensitive UAV are reviewed, the electronic nose applicable to gas-sensitive UAV is summarised, and the design methods, existing problems and its solutions of gas-sensitive UAV are introduced. After that, the research on gas localisation and gas distribution mapping is summarised and analysed, and the possible research directions in the future are proposed.