Engineering Sciences

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Terrorists often choose hostage-like activities, taking its full advantage to negotiate with security forces and/or with governments. Lack of proper information about the crisis scene, such as terrorists’ number, position, etc., in such emergency situation is a hindrance for security forces to take appropriate actions and to combat terrorism. A minor mistake by them may claim many innocents’ lives.

The main objective of this project is to develop a robotic swarm surveillance system to facilitate security forces accessing real-time crisis scene information while maintaining stealth. The system will comprise of a swarm of lizard-like robots. The lizard-like structure of the robots will ensure stealth while enabling locomotion on the ceilings and walls at the crisis scene. The robots will possess onboard computational resources, which along with computationally powerful remote server deployed in the control unit will be organized in client-server architecture. The onboard computers of the robots will perform relatively lighter computation such as data acquisition, preprocessing, and its secure communication to the server, whereas the server will be responsible for heavy computation including crisis site intelligence extraction, robot swarm formation control and motion planning of individual robot.

The key components of the overall system are:
(1) Automated Lizard-like Robot: For stealth and agile movement
(2) Sensing: To capture real-time hostage site information
(3) Intelligence Gathering: To extract intelligence from sensor data
(4) Communication: Low Powered Secure Communications
(5) Proven Correctness Platform: Based on formal methods such as Model Checking, Abstract Interpretation, Automated Theorem Proving, etc.

In particular, the development of such critical system involves many research challenges, including:
(1) Design and Building Lizard-like Robots: (a) Miniaturization and imparting real lizard-like locomotion to the robot, (b) Integration of various sensors for acquiring crucial hostage site data and navigation.
(2) Automated Control and Planning: (a) Automated motion planning for stealthy navigation at the hostage site, (b) Feedback control for executing motion plan of robotic swarm.
(3) Intelligence Gathering: Data collection, processing and analysis in real time to extract knowledge about the hostage site.
(4) Communication: Low powered secure communication between robots and control unit.
(5) Formally Proven Safety and Security: The robot should not behave unexpectedly and the overall surveillance system must be robust.
The proposed project would showcase the application of interdisciplinary robotics area to the surveillance purposes. We believe that such robotic swarm can have a great impact on the nation’s security system, including rescue operations under critical situations like hostage, hijack, disasters, etc.

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