06-12-2012, 05:04 PM
Enhancing building security systems with autonomous robots
Enhancing building security.doc (Size: 235 KB / Downloads: 21)
Abstract
During the last years, investments in security have been raised due to a different set of factors like terrorism. Particularly, the surveillance system of buildings is an important issue to human daily life. This paper describes the development of a multirobot system for building surveillance applications over Internet. Each robot can handle some daily surveillance routine tasks. Sensor information such as real-time images captured by a camera on the robot with pan/tilt/zoom functions can be transmitted back to the central management office via a local area network. Teleoperation of the robots via the Internet or Intranet is also possible. The complete system can be installed and reprogrammed in a very short time thanks to a high level task application programming environment named RoboGraph. Using this tool the application can be programmed using Petri nets with commands and events already defined.
System description
The global architecture used is shown in figure 1. The classic surveillance system of the building is connected to the Home Server that will register all the events produced by the different sensors. In addition, a set of autonomous mobile robots are also connected to the Home Server via wifi, GPRS or 3G. On the other side, users can monitor the system using a GUI that allows seeing monitor cameras and any other sensors on the robots. Also, special events detected by the robots are shown on the GUI in pop-up windows. On the other side, it is also possible to remotely control some actuators such as pan-tilts, camera settings, etc.
Robots are able to patrol programmed or randomly generated paths at any time. Patrol tasks can be scheduled to start at fixed times during the week, to be executed during different intervals of time.
Robots can also tackle false alarms. False alarms are quite expensive for security companies and robots can help to detect them.