Environmental monitoring using autonomous vehicles: a survey of recent searching techniques

•Applications of autonomous search for environmental monitoring are presented.•Different platforms used in environmental monitoring are reviewed.•Review of state of the art autonomous search methods.•Presented recent developments in distributed source localization algorithm.•There is a paradigm shift from single agent to cooperative multi-agent systems.

Autonomous vehicles are becoming an essential tool in a wide range of environmental applications that include ambient data acquisition, remote sensing, and mapping of the spatial extent of pollutant spills. Among these applications, pollution source localization has drawn increasing interest due to its scientific and commercial interest and the emergence of a new breed of robotic vehicles capable of operating in harsh environments without human supervision. The aim is to find the location of a region that is the source of a given substance of interest (e.g. a chemical pollutant at sea or a gas leakage in air) using a group of cooperative autonomous vehicles. Motivated by fast paced advances in this challenging area, this paper surveys recent advances in searching techniques that are at the core of environmental monitoring strategies using autonomous vehicles.

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