A Heterogeneous Robotic Network for Distributed Ambient Assisted Living

Networks of robots and sensors have been recognized to be a powerful tool for developing fully automated systems that monitor environments and daily life activities in Ambient Assisted Living applications. Nevertheless, issues related to active control of heterogeneous sensors for high-level scene interpretation and mission execution are still open. This work presents the authors' ongoing research about the design and implementation of a heterogeneous robotic network that includes static cameras and multi-sensor mobile robots for distributed target tracking. The system is intended to provide robot-assisted monitoring and surveillance of large environments. The proposed solution exploits a distributed control architecture to enable the network to autonomously accomplish general-purpose and complex monitoring tasks. The nodes can both act with some degree of autonomy and cooperate with each other. The chapter describes the concepts underlying the designed system architecture and presents the results of simulations performed in a realistic scenario to validate the distributed target tracking algorithm. Preliminary experimental results obtained in a real context are also presented showing the feasibility of the proposed system.