Localization of chemical sources using E. Coli chemotaxis

摘要

This paper furthers the application of chemotaxis to small-scale robots by simulating a system that localizes a chemical source in a dynamic fluid environment. This type of system responds to a chemical stimulus by mimicking, for example, the way that E. Coli bacteria move toward attractants (nutrients) and away from repellents. E. Coli use the intracellular signaling pathway to process the temporal change in the chemical concentration to determine if the cells should run or tumble. Previous work has shown that this process can be simulated with robots and used to localize chemical sources based upon a fixed nutrient gradient. Our work furthers this study by simulating the injection of an effluent of chemical at a specified location in an environment and uses computational fluid dynamics to model the interactions of the robot with the fluid while performing chemotaxis. The interactions between the chemical and fluid are also modelled with the advection diffusion equation to determine the concentration gradient. This method allows us to compute, over a lattice, the chemical concentration at all points and feed these results into an existing E. Coli controller for the robot, which results in the robot executing a tumble or a run according to a probabilistic formula. By simulating the robot in this complex environment, our work facilitates refinement of the chemotaxis controller while proving the ability of chemotactic robots to localize specific chemicals in environments that more closely resemble those encountered in the wide-ranging types of locations in which this robotic system might be deployed.