The robot described in this report, intends to serve as a surveillance robot only. Its main behaviors are following light, following movement and avoiding obstacles. The robot uses IR sensors to avoid obstacles, together with an adaptive algorithm for adjusting each sensor’s threshold. There are three contact switches (bumpers) at the front of the robot, which are used for collision detection. This happens due to blind spots or to behavioral responses relative to the adaptive behavioral algorithm approach which allows the robot to get bolder when it finds itself almost trapped. It’s intended that the robot, wanders around the rooms and adapts to new environments, because doing so it can monitor any movement or light source and sound the alarm for an intruder. We do not want at all to have the robot covering the entire room or anything like it, we just want it to “search intruders from the distance”, efficiently. The light sensing is done by using a spinning motor’s retina, which gives a light image of the surrounding environment. The movement detection is done using very basic optic flow concepts like detecting simple brightness changes above a certain threshold, by comparing two consecutive images from the robot’s image retina. The obstacle avoidance behavior, does well when changing from one environment to a different one, for example when going from a highly reflective environment to a less reflective one or the opposite, or when going through doors and narrow passages in general. Nevertheless the robot can get “claustrophobic”, when it is put in a very confined environment, but because this is a particular environment, not likely to happen in a surveillance patrol, we find this emergent functionality understandable. All that would happen is that the robot gets quite confused and keeps bumping on the walls, eventually getting out of the situation after some time. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult get this robot trapped because its adaptive threshold tends to keep it away from narrow passages.

» Free PDF eBooks Download
» Science/Science Robot