Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1. System's deployment (in this example, camera 1 is detecting an event, robot A
is being sighted by camera 5 and robot B by camera 2). We can also see the Field Of
View (FOV) of different cameras.
2 System Description
Figure 1 shows a schematic representation of our system. As we have men-
tioned before, in our system we consider the existence of two kind of agents:
robots and cameras (in this paper the terms camera-agent and camera are used
interchangeably). Robots (RA and RB in the Figure) navigate within the en-
vironment avoiding obstacles and moving towards areas where their presence is
required (call events from now on, CE in Fig. 1). Cameras, on the contrary, are
deployed by the users in the environment, and they have two main function-
alities: a) to detect important events within their Fields Of View (FOVs from
now on), and to notify these events to the robots if their presence is required,
b) to support the robot navigation without a specific map of the environment.
As an example of a call event, the camera could detect a group of people to
which the robot could offer information or assistance. This ties in with the idea
of general-purpose guide robots working in different scenarios.
2.1 Camera-Agents
In this section we describe the hardware and software implementation of the
camera-agents.
Hardware Implementation. Camera agents consist on a video camera, a
laptop, a WIFI Access Point, several batteries and an aluminium structure built
up with a box and a mast attached to it. The video camera is placed on top
of the mast, while the bottom box contains the other elements. This design is
easy to transport, to deploy and to pick up, allowing us to take our system to
different events. Moreover, it does not depend on external power supplies, and
does not require any modifications in the environment.
Software Implementation. The software that controls each camera runs four
concurrent threads (Fig. 2). We must be aware that this software is the same for
every camera:
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search