An Android Based Mobile Robot for Monitoring and Surveillance

Abstract

We developed a sustainable surveillance robot that is cost effective using an Arduino microcontroller together with a motor shield and an Android smartphone that runs the Operating System. The robot consists of a video camera and wifi robot link. Smartphones come with superb hardware that satisfies the above needs. This can be leveraged upon through the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that is provided for the operating system. However, the building cost for the robot with a smartphone is greatly reduced. The robot can be remotely controlled using the wifi module and a microcontroller, smart phone interface embedded on the robot. The camera on the robot is used to capture and record real time video from the robot. The robot can be controlled based on visual feedback from the same smartphone. The four wheeled dc motors help to navigate the robot and ultrasonic sensor to avoid obstacles. The camera is attached to the wifi robot link which enables it to capture the environment or any object of concern. Experimental results with varied positions of obstacle show the flexibility of the robot to avoid it and have shown a decent performance and it is getting a communication range of nearly 50m, which is good enough for many surveillance applications.