The German Tank Problem & Navigating by Scent
Kordel Kade France
A robot searching for the source of an odor must eventually answer a notably hard question: have I arrived? Near the source, concentration gradients homogenize, turbulence corrupts the signal, and a small robot often lacks the positional accuracy to map the plume. Here, we describe a lightweight remedy inspired by a World War II statistics conundrum: the German tank problem. To approximate German armament production, Allied analysts developed an estimator based on serial numbers from captured tanks. Analogously, we use the same procedure over sampled chemical sensor readings from a robot to create estimates for the peak concentration of an odor plume, and therefore the odor's source. Treating each sensor reading as an observation, our unbiased estimator needs only a running maximum and a sample counter. A confidence bound turns both numbers into a principled rule that the robot or UAV can use to determine whether it should keep searching for the odor source. We derive the estimator and its bound, demonstrate its sample efficiency, and examine its robustness even when its assumptions fail. Finally, we summarize the estimator's role as the termination criterion for olfactory navigation.
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