Abstract
Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) equipped with surveillance cameras present a flexible complement to the numerous stationary sensors being used in security applications today. However, to take full advantage of the flexibility and speed offered by a group of UGV platforms, a fast way to compute desired camera locations to cover an area or a set of buildings, e.g., in response to an alarm, is needed.
Building upon earlier results in terrain guarding and sensor placement we propose a way to find candidate guard positions that satisfy a large set of view angle and range constraints simulataneously. Since the original problem is NP-complete, we do not seek to find the true optimal set of guard positions. Instead, a near optimal subset of the candidate points is chosen using a scheme with a known approximation ratio of O(log(n)). A number of examples are presented to illustrate the approach.
All three authors were funded by the Swedish defence materiel administration (FMV) and the Swedish armed forces through the Technologies for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (TAIS) project. 297316-LB704859.
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Nilsson, U., Ă–gren, P., Thunberg, J. (2009). Towards Optimal Positioning of Surveillance UGVs. In: Hirsch, M.J., Commander, C.W., Pardalos, P.M., Murphey, R. (eds) Optimization and Cooperative Control Strategies. Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, vol 381. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88063-9_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88063-9_14
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