Fast positioning of limited-visibility guards for the inspection of 2D workspaces

This paper presents a novel method for deciding the locations of “guards” required to visually inspect a given 2D workspace. The decided guard positions can then be used as control points in the path of a mobile robot that autonomously inspects a workspace. It is assumed that each of the guards (or the mobile robot that visits the guard positions in some order) is equipped with a panoramic camera of 360 degrees field of view. However, the camera has limited visibility, in the sense that it can observe with sufficient detail objects that are not further than a predefined visibility range. The method seeks to efficiently produce solutions that contain the smaller possible number of guards. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is computationally efficient and that, although suboptimal, decides a small number of guards.