RS-CPS: A distributed architecture of robotic surveillance cyber-physical system in the nature environment

Modern nature surveillance systems are highly automated and require distributed architectures in order to increase understanding of the environment by integrating data from various monitors and sensors, which are mounted not only on fixed stations, but also on robotic actuators. In this paper, we propose a distributed architecture of robotic surveillance cyber-physical system (RS-CPS) in the nature environment, which is designed as integration of computation and physical processes. The RS-CPS system consists of five levels including smart connection, data-to-information conversion, cyber communication, cognition, and configuration. Based on this architecture, the nature risk such as wildfires, the activities of wild animals and the climate changes in plants can be constantly monitored by the cooperation of multiple agents such as autonomous UAVs, robotic pan-tilt-zoom cameras, forest infrared cameras, songbird acoustic recorders, GPS tracking collars and ecological factor sensors located in field. The experiments demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the new architecture.