English

Olfactory search

Biological Physics 2024-05-07 v1

Abstract

The task of olfactory search is ubiquitous in nature and in technology, from animals in the quest of food or of a mating partner, to robots searching for the source of hazardous fumes in a chemical plant. Here, we focus on the algorithmic approach to this task: we systematically review the different olfactory search strategies. Special emphasis is given to the formal description as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, which allows the computation of optimal actions and helps clarifying the relationships between several effective heuristic search strategies.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.03374,
  title  = {Olfactory search},
  author = {Antonio Celani and Emanuele Panizon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.03374},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

22 pages, 1 figure, review

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:17:54.830Z