Indoor Patrol Robot

This is an experimental project to build a low-cost, low profile prototype wheeled robot that can patrol an indoor environment for surveillance or security purposes. The idea is that users can leave these in their home or office while they are away, and it will constantly travel a fixed route while taking photos at fixed points for the user to view later. The cost of these robots should be lower than having multiple fixed cameras, or could augment existing cameras by reaching areas that are out of camera line of sight. For navigation the robots do not autonomously localize, but can follow predefined instructions for motion. The instructions are not distance based but rather landmark based, using walls, corners, and visual landmarks, hence we assume a fixed starting point and end point. The robot is also not capable of physically opening doors or climbing stairs.

The first version was built with holonomic drive and leveraged the Better Together Framework to allow real-time remote-viewing of the video, including a feature to upload photos to OneDrive. The robot can sef-navigate to a charging base, enabling 24/7 maintenance-free operation.

For the second version we added vision-based landmark detection.

For the third version we’ve switched to conventional drive to improve traversal speed, and removed the Better Together framework, replacing it with conventional dedicated sensors. Since the hardware has been reworked we are currently rebuilding to achieve feature parity with the previous iterations.