Multi-robot Surveillance Through a Distributed Sensor Network

Automatic surveillance of public areas, such as airports, train stations, and shopping malls, requires the capacity of detecting and recognizing possible abnormal situations in populated environments. In this book chapter, an architecture for intelligent surveillance in indoor public spaces, based on an integration of interactive and non-interactive heterogeneous sensors, is described. As a difference with respect to traditional, passive and pure vision-based systems, the proposed approach relies on a distributed sensor network combining RFID tags, multiple mobile robots, and fixed RGBD cameras. The presence and the position of people in the scene is detected by suitably combining data coming from the sensor nodes, including those mounted on board of the mobile robots that are in charge of patrolling the environment. The robots can adapt their behavior according to the current situation, on the basis of a Prey-Predator scheme, and can coordinate their actions to fulfill the required tasks. Experimental results have been carried out both on real and on simulated data to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.