Design of HERMES: a mobile autonomous surveillance robot for security patrol

Abstract

The HERMES autonomous surveillance robot platform is a low-cost outdoor autonomous surveillance vehicle. It is designed to autonomously patrol outdoor areas performing surveillance and providing automated alerts of detected vehicles and people. The design and testing of this system are covered in this paper. The design philosophy focused on the use of off-the-shelf components wherever possible with the base of the robot being a modified electric quadbike. The testing has verified that the surveillance robot can perform real-time person and vehicle detection, video streaming, manual and autonomous navigation on a low-cost platform. The development of the robot platform is continuing with the current focus being on the improvement of the autonomous navigation, ingress protection (IP) rating and verification of the battery life.