Wadoro: An autonomous mobile robot for surveillance

This paper presents Wadoro (WAtch DOg RObot); an autonomous mobile robot for household surveillance in open-spaces like roof at night; but only shaded areas such as verandah during daytime. The robot has the capability to detect humans in near real-time round-the-clock using passive infrared motion sensors and camera. The work cycle of the robot is divided into phases of human detection; tracking; recognition and alert-generation with simultaneous phase of self-protection. On detecting a human; it starts tracking to detect the face using Haar-like features based cascade classifier. Subsequent recognition is done using local binary pattern histograms approach to ascertain if the face matches with the face in database. In case of mismatch; an alert in the form of phone call to the mobile phone is generated. Self-protection ensures collision-free movements and prevent it from being stolen by generating an alert call on detecting its pick up from the ground. The experimental results demonstrate its successful operation.