Development of Autonomous Networked Robots (ANR) for Surveillance: Conceptual Design and Requirements

ANR are featured by mobility and communication capabilities as they involve mobile robots and ad-hoc sensor networks enabling ubiquitous applications. This work proposes a low-cost ANR surveillance system for intruder and fire events within a large environment that is divided into operational zones with sensor nodes. Each sensor node comprises of low-cost odor, smoke, infrared fire, and motion detector sensors, radio frequency (RF) transceivers for networking and communication. Events detected within the zones are routed to the robots while suppression systems are activated based on the event criticality. On receiving the event signals from different zones, the robots navigate to these zones to assess the scenario as required. This assessment is then routed to a base station for further processing. Each robot is associated with one operational zone, but is not limited to it, since it performs other environment related functions. The network enables a distributed system with sensor nodes as the primary task distributor, while the robots negotiate and redistribute these tasks. Hence, path planning, and navigation would be executed locally and communicated among the robot team for effective collaboration. This work aims to advance research in the field of ANR through applicational approaches.