Spherical Mobile Robot for Monitoring and Tracking Children Indoors

Families around the world continue to suffer the loss of a child due to unintentional injuries caused by accidents that could have been prevented. Stationary monitoring solutions are widely used to aid in the prevention of such situations. However, these technologies present certain gaps that the researchers would like to address by adding a real time notification ability and an ensured way of continuously monitoring by making sure that the test subject will never be lost by the intended solution. This research paper presents the hardware division of a technological solution to child monitoring by developing a semi-autonomous spherical robot to follow a child as the subject moves throughout the room. The spherical robot would have the ability to manually navigate around two controlled test setups: living room and child’s playroom. The robot would also be able to distinguish designated safe zones and danger zones with the help of the RFID technology. The real time notification ability will be highlighted by giving the robot the feature of sending SMS messages to the subject’s parent or guardian indicating the time and place of where the child last exited. The manual navigation was tested with the use of two controlled test setups and the notification system utilizing the RFID technology was tested thirty times in six various places having different signal strengths ranging from -50 dBm to -120 dBm.