Sensor networked mobile robotics

The dominant architecture for mobile robot perception uses sensors on-board the robot, providing a first-person perspective on the environment. We demonstrate a novel mobile robot architecture that uses an environment-based sensor network, which provides third-person perception. The idea is that a mobile robot working in the area tunes in to broadcasts from the video camera network (or in this case from an environment-based computer processing the video frames) to receive sensor data. This distributed sensing configuration offers several advantages over on-board sensing.