Explorations of Turbulent Odor Plumes with an Autonomous Underwater Robot

A study has been conducted to examine the mechanism by which lobsters extract guidance information from complex signals in turbulent odor plumes by using an autonomous underwater robot. The robot exhibited abrupt, brief turns at irregular intervals when placed in the center of fresh-water flume, but moved with regular side-to-side oscillations when placed at the entrance of the proximal jet. These observations suggest that lobsters use algorithms based on simple bilateral amplitude information for guidance in the proximal cone to find its way to the source of plume.