An Autonomous Mobile Robotic System for Surveillance of Indoor Environments

The development of intelligent surveillance systems is an active research area. In this context, mobile and multifunctional robots are generally adopted as means to reduce the environment structuring and the number of devices needed to cover a given area. Nevertheless, the number of different sensors mounted on the robot, and the number of complex tasks related to exploration, monitoring, and surveillance make the design of the overall system extremely challenging. In this paper, we present our autonomous mobile robot for surveillance of indoor environments. Our approach proposes a system to autonomously handle general purpose tasks as well as complex surveillance issues simultaneously. It is shown that the proposed robotic surveillance scheme successfully addresses a number of basic problems related to environment mapping, localization and autonomous navigation, as well as surveillance tasks, like scene processing to detect abandoned or removed objects and people detection and following. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated through experimental tests using a multisensor platform equipped with a monocular camera, a laser scanner, encoders, and an RFID device. Real world applications of the proposed system include surveillance of wide areas (e.g. airports and museums) and buildings, and monitoring of safety equipment.