Rapid inference of geographical location with an event-based electronic nose

Sensory information is crucial for the successful interaction of an agent with its outside world. How sensory stimuli are optimally encoded remains an open research question. Neuro-inspired coding strategies have been successfully applied to many tasks dealing with vision, auditory perception, touch and vibration sensing [3, 6, 11, 17]. For the sense of olfaction, there still exists a large performance gap between artificial and biological systems [5]. This is particularly evident if one considers the fast-changing odour distribution caused by air turbulences. The fluctuation frequencies in an odour plume are governed by a power law [13] and can carry essential information about the odour source [15].