Autonomous Detection and Assessment with Moving Sensors

Current approaches to physical security suffer from high false alarm rates and frequent human operator involvement, despite the relative rarity of real-world threats. We present a novel architecture for autonomous adaptive physical security called autonomous detection and assessment with moving sensors (ADAMS). ADAMS is a framework for reducing nuisance and false alarms by placing mobile robotic platforms equipped with sensors outside the normal asset perimeter. These robotic agents integrate sensor data from multiple perspectives over time, and autonomously move to obtain the best new data to reduce uncertainty in the threat scene. Inferences drawn from data fused over time provide ultimate decisions regarding whether to alert human operators. This paper describes the framework and algorithms used in a prototype ADAMS implementation. We describe the results of simulations comparing this framework to alternate paradigms. These simulations show ADAMS has a 4x increase in the range at which threats are identified versus traditional static sensors, and a 5x reduction in false alarms triggered versus frameworks where all sensor detections become alarms, leading to reduced operator load. Further, these simulations show this framework for reacting to new potential threats significantly outperforms methods which merely patrol the site. We also present the results of preliminary hardware trials of an exemplar prototype system, providing limited validation of the simulations in a real-time physical demonstration.