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arXiv · 2506.04539

Olfactory Inertial Odometry: Sensor Calibration and Drift Compensation

Kordel K. France·Ovidiu Daescu·Anirban Paul·Shalini Prasad
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Abstract

Visual inertial odometry (VIO) is a process for fusing visual and kinematic data to understand a machine's state in a navigation task. Olfactory inertial odometry (OIO) is an analog to VIO that fuses signals from gas sensors with inertial data to help a robot navigate by scent. Gas dynamics and environmental factors introduce disturbances into olfactory navigation tasks that can make OIO difficult to facilitate. With our work here, we define a process for calibrating a robot for OIO that generalizes to several olfaction sensor types. Our focus is specifically on calibrating OIO for centimeter-level accuracy in localizing an odor source on a slow-moving robot platform to demonstrate use cases in robotic surgery and touchless security screening. We demonstrate our process for OIO calibration on a real robotic arm and show how this calibration improves performance over a cold-start olfactory navigation task.

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Kordel K. France, Ovidiu Daescu, Anirban Paul, Shalini Prasad. 2025-06-05. Olfactory Inertial Odometry: Sensor Calibration and Drift Compensation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04539

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