Information-Guided Safe Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Gas Source Localization using sUAS

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05569v1
• Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:29:37 GMT
• Title: Information-Guided Safe Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Gas Source Localization using sUAS
• Abstract summary: In turbulent atmospheric boundary layers, highly intermittent scalar concentration fields violate the assumptions of classical gradient-based navigation.<n>We introduce an Information-Guided Safe Reinforcement Learning framework evaluated within a custom, GPU-accelerated 3D simulation environment.<n>Our framework achieves nearly 80% localization success on complex, mobile sources.
• Score: 3.8218584696400484
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The autonomous localization of fugitive gas emissions using small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) constitutes a fundamentally ill-posed inverse problem. In turbulent atmospheric boundary layers, highly intermittent scalar concentration fields violate the assumptions of classical gradient-based navigation, causing data-driven estimators to suffer from severe noise and spurious local minima. To address these challenges, we introduce an Information-Guided Safe Reinforcement Learning framework evaluated within a custom, GPU-accelerated 3D simulation environment coupling an Eulerian wind solver with a Lagrangian puff dispersion model. We identify a critical vulnerability in deterministic information-seeking planners - a Gramian bias where agents act greedily upon flawed early estimates, starving the estimator of spatial diversity. To systematically break this degeneracy, our architecture integrates a classical empirical observability Gramian (EMGR) planner with a learned Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) exploratory policy. A deterministic meta-supervisor actively monitors estimator reliability via Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, dynamically blending deterministic exploitation with learned exploration to steer the sUAS into high-information zones. Trained via a progressive curriculum and safeguarded by a strictly enforced Robust Control Barrier Function (RCBF), our RL framework achieves nearly 80% localization success on complex, mobile sources - drastically outperforming classical baselines (~30%) - while ensuring zero safety violations.

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