Analysis of an Extended Model of Bio-Inspired Source Seeking

Braitenberg vehicles are widely known models of sensor-driven source seeking behavior in animals, known in biology as taxes. While the original vehicles are reactive and move according to the instantaneously perceived stimulus, experiments have found that animals also exploit temporal changes in the stimulus for source seeking. For instance, cockroaches rely on the temporal changes in the odour concentration to perform odour localisation, which has proven a highly challenging task for robots. In this paper, we present a new mathematical model, the dynamic Braitenberg vehicle, that incorporates the temporal rate of change of the stimulus in the source seeking behavior. Our theoretical analysis of the model stability shows that including a term dependent on the temporal evolution of the stimulus significantly improves the behaviour of the closed-loop system compared to its reactive counterpart. The paper illustrates the validity of the new model and the theoretical results of the stability analysis through a set of simulations. Our proposed dynamic vehicle represents a more accurate model of animal behavior and has the potential to improve the performance of mobile robots in challenging tasks like chemical source localisation.