Multi-robot teams for environmental monitoring

In this chapter we target the problem of monitoring an environment with a team of mobile robots having on board video-cameras and fixed stereo cameras available within the environment. Current research regards homogeneous robots, whereas in this chapter we study highly heterogeneous systems and consider the problem of patrolling an area with a dynamic set of agents. The system presented in the chapter provides enhanced multi-robot coordination and vision-based activity monitoring techniques. The main objective is the integration and development of coordination techniques for multi-robot environment coverage, with the goal of maximizing the quality of information gathered from a given area thus, implementing a Heterogeneous mobile and reconfigurable multi-camera video-surveillance system.