Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2607.13853

Merging Reaction to Cognition: A Hybrid Cognitive Strategy for Odour Source Localisation in Natural Environments

Hugo Magalhães·Rui Baptista·Lino Marques
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Chemical pollutants released into the environment are transported by turbulent flows, generating complex, intermittent plume structures that threaten ecosystems and human health. Rapid localisation of emission sources is critical, and field robots equipped with chemical sensors provide a viable means to perform this task. However, inferring source location from sensor readings remains difficult due to sparse detections and the absence of reliable concentration gradients. Existing approaches fall into two paradigms. Bio-inspired strategies rely on reactive behaviours triggered by detections, such as surge-casting, offering efficiency but requiring scenario-specific tuning. Cognitive strategies integrate observations into a probabilistic belief over source location. While more robust, they suffer from excessive exploration and strong dependence on belief accuracy. The Fast-Cognitive algorithm reduced this computational burden but preserved the fundamental limitations. Previous Markov chain analysis revealed that source-directed motions occur roughly twice as often following odour detections, indicating that reactive behaviours naturally emerge within cognitive frameworks. This work proposes a hybrid strategy that explicitly incorporates bio-inspired reactivity into belief-dependent motion planning. It introduces a detection-triggered switching mechanism formalising transitions between crossflow exploration and source-directed motion, prioritising source proximity over information gain. Behavioural parameters are derived directly from belief metrics, enabling adaptive reactivity without manual tuning. The approach is validated through simulations under three turbulence conditions and field experiments with an autonomous surface vehicle in the Mondego River, Portugal. Results show up to 50% reduction in travelled distance, 86% success rate, and 3.2m average localisation error.

Explore related subjects

cs.RO

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Hugo Magalhães, Rui Baptista, Lino Marques. 2026-07-15. Merging Reaction to Cognition: A Hybrid Cognitive Strategy for Odour Source Localisation in Natural Environments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13853

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in $\pi_{0.5}$. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains $\pi_{0.5}$'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming $\pi_{0.5}$ on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

Imitation learning has achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation, yet most existing approaches assume clean backgrounds and lack explicit mechanisms for obstacle-aware motion generation. Extending such policies to cluttered, real-world scenes with unstructured obstacles remains a key generalization challenge. We present ObstaDiff, a decomposed diffusion-policy framework with a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder. ObstaDiff extracts a structured target-obstacle-background representation, enabling the downstream alignment policy to generate end-effector trajectories toward a target-centered bottleneck pose while reasoning about surrounding obstacles. We evaluate ObstaDiff on 61 real-robot greenhouse trials per method (366 executions in total). ObstaDiff achieves 75.41% average task success and 8.20% average obstacle collision rate, outperforming representative imitation-learning baselines and improving generalization in cluttered agricultural scenes.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Testing Between the Test Cases: Proving End-to-End Steering in Conditions You Never Drove

AI-based automated vehicle testing is challenging because a model that passes every test condition can still fail in the real world. Formal verification offers a way to directly address this gap. On a simulated highway and an arterial road we trained two small end-to-end steering networks each in CARLA, one on clear conditions alone and one on clear, fog, night and low sun. All four models were driven against a 2.19 ft lane-departure budget. Without driving again, we used bound propagation, a formal method that reads the trained weights, to compute how far steering can drift at every disturbance strength between two captured images. One calculation covers more than a campaign could drive: on the arterial it spans 133 poses, where ten intensities each would be 10^133 combinations, in minutes on one GPU. Not only did formal verification find conditions that broke the clear-trained policy without simulation testing, it provided some preliminary evidence for potential failures between the test cases. Our overall conclusion is that formal verification is a viable complement to simulation, and could be adopted as a part of verification and validation for automated driving.

cs.RO↗