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This paper presents the hardware and software components of a robotic team designed for security and surveillance applications. The team consists of two types of robotic agents. The first type is a larger, heavy-duty robotic platform, called the "ranger." Rangers are used to transport, deploy, and supervise a number of small, mobile sensor platforms called "scouts," the second type of robotic agent. In an example scenario, the scouts are deployed into an office/lab environment, navigate towards dark areas, and position themselves to detect moving objects using their cameras. A ranger communicates with each of the scouts and determines whether there are objects of potential interest within the observed area. The paper also includes experimental results for individual scout and ranger-scout activities.

Abstract-We have designed and built a set of miniature robots, called Scouts, and have developed a distributed software system to control them. This paper addresses the fundamental choices we made in the design of the control software, describes experimental results in a surveillance task, and analyzes the factors that affect robot performance.Space and power limitations on the Scouts severely restrict the computational power of their on-board computers, requiring a proxy-processing scheme in which the robots depend on remote computers for their computing needs. While this allows the robots to be autonomous, the fact that robots' behaviors are executed remotely introduces an additional complication -sensor data and motion commands have to be exchanged using wireless communications channels. Communications channels cannot always be shared, thus requiring the robots to obtain exclusive access to them.We present experimental results on a surveillance task in which multiple robots patrol an area and watch for motion. We discuss how the limited communications bandwidth affects robot performance in accomplishing the task and analyze how performance depends on the number of robots that share the bandwidth.

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The problem of vision-guided control of miniature mobile robots is investigated. Untethered mobile robots with small physical dimensions of around 10 cm or less do not permit powerful onboard computers because of size and power constraints. These challenges have, in the past, reduced the functionality of such devices to that of a complex remote control vehicle with fancy sensors. With the help of a computationally more powerful entity such as a larger companion robot, the control loop can be closed. Using the miniature robot's video transmission or that of an observer to localize it in the world, control commands can be computed and relayed to the inept robot. The result is a system that exhibits autonomous capabilities. The framework presented here solves the problem of climbing stairs with the miniature Scout robot. The robot's unique locomotion mode, the jump, is employed to hop one step at a time. Methods for externally tracking the Scout are developed. A large number of real-world experiments are conducted and the results discussed.

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