Contaminant Detection and Localization With Design of Experiment and Response Surface Methodology

The spread of contaminant into the environment due to a high volume of leakage from point sources is a very real threat in the modern world. Since the contaminant can often be dangerous to human operators, multiple robotic agents equipped with suitable sensors are playing an increasingly important role in the so-called contaminant detection problem than before. This paper proposes a contaminant detection methodology which can not only locate the (possibly multiple) source of the contaminant, but also estimate the intensity in an environment evolving over both space and time. The methods can deal with measurement noise and do not need any gradient information.