A distributed cooperative architecture for robotic networks with application to ambient intelligence

A Distributed Cooperative Architecture (DCA) for applications of Ambient Intelligence is presented. The proposed cooperative system is composed by several static cameras and by a team of multisensor mobile robots. The nodes of the robotic network can act with some degree of autonomy and can cooperate to perform general purpose complex tasks such as distributed people tracking. The paper describes the system architecture and illustrates the feasibility of the proposed approach through preliminary experimental results.