Limits on the performance of Infotaxis under inaccurate modelling of the environment

Abstract

We study the performance of infotaxis search strategy measured by the rate of success and mean search time, under changes in the environment parameters such as diffusivity, rate of emission or wind velocity. We also investigate the drop of performance caused by an innacurate modelling of the environment. Our findings show that infotaxis remains robust as long as the estimated parameters fall within a certain range around their true values, but the success rate quickly drops making infotaxis no longer feasible if the searcher agent severely underestimates or overestimates the real environment parameters. This study places some limits on the performance of infotaxis, and thus it has practical consequences for the design of infotaxis based machines to track and detect an emitting source of chemicals or volatile substances.