Indoors Surveillance Mobile Robot

 

 

Introduction:

 

Surveillance robots usually move within environments previously observed. An onboard vision sensor allows acquiring data of the environments and using that data to visit, and image more times, some places already visited.

 

This MSc project proposal is concerned with estimating the location of a wheeled mobile robot, saving in a database some places to image again as e.g. the home location, and moving among the previously observed places.

 

The wheeled mobile robot is about 20cm long. The robot has one onboard camera and one IMU, which are integrated by a Raspberry-pi. A wireless connection allows using a desktop computer to process the data acquired onboard.

 

 

Detailed description:

 

Sensing and moving in an unknown cluttered environment is based on navigation methodologies, such as visual simultaneous navigation and mapping (v-SLAM).

 

More in detail, is considered that the robot acquires information in a first run, and then uses that information to find previously seen landmarks and therefore repeat paths travelled in the past.

 

The work is organized in the following main steps:

1) data acquisition, implies moving the robot within the scene and capturing scene information

2) data fusion into a state representation involving the robot pose and landmarks

3) demonstration of an autonomous travelling as e.g. coming back to the home location

 

 

References:

 

[Anjos21] Visual Inertial Odometry for Surveillance Mobile Robots, Miguel Anjos, MSc Thesis, MEEC, IST - started Sep.2021

 

[Nogueira21] Visual Inertial Odometry on Self Acquired Datasets with State Initialization, Paulo André Nogueira, MEEC/IST, 2021

 

[Cruz15] Wireless Mobile Camera, João Cruz, MSc thesis, MEEC/IST, 2015

 

[Pereira14] Robotic Home Sentinel, David Pereira, MSc thesis, MEEC/IST, 2014

 

[Mendonça14] Omni-Telepresence using Mobile Robots, José Mendonça, MSc thesis, MEEC/IST, 2014

 

[Ribeiro13] Nomadic Surveillance Camera, MSc thesis, MEEC/IST, 2013

 

 

Expected results:

 

At the end of the work the students will have enriched their knowledge in:

* Computer vision

 

 

Observations:

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More MSc dissertation proposals on Computer and Robot Vision in:

 

http://omni.isr.ist.utl.pt/~jag