Mobile Robot Cooperation with Infrastructure For Surveillance: Towards Cloud Robotics

This paper proposes a cooperative framework among a mobile robot and an infrastructure for the sake of surveillance and identification. The infrastructure is comprised of a network of cameras, inertial sensors, a facial identification system and a GPU-enabled server. The cooperation among the mobile robot and infrastructure is service-based. The scene is observed by camera sensors. There is a mobile robot freely moving within the scene. For some security reasons the system gets interested in identification of a person inside the scene. The infrastructure provides three services to the mobile robot including positions of the person and robot as well as 3D information of the person. In the other sides, the mobile robot provides the facial (portrait) image of a requested person, as a service. Using these services the infrastructure can identify the person. The cameras in the infrastructure and also the camera on the mobile robot are rigidly coupled with an inertial sensor (IS). The inertial data provided by IS is used in two ways: definition of a fusion-based virtual camera and also virtual planes to register 3D data. Taking advantage of the defined virtual camera, a localization method is proposed to obtain the position of the robot with respect to the infrastructure. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework for the purpose of being used in cloud robotics.