Development of an autonomous mobile surveillance system using a network-based RTK-GPS

This paper describes an autonomous mobile surveillance system usually used in a factory premises with some high-rise buildings. This system consists of a wireless LAN network, a base station and an autonomous vehicle. The vehicle is equipped with a GPS/INS navigation system using the network-based Real-Time Kinematic GPS (RTK-GPS) with Positioning Augmentation Services (PAS (TM), Mitsubishi Electric Corporation 2003), an Area Laser Radar (ALR), a CCD camera called slaved camera, and an Omni-Directional Vision (ODV) sensor for surveillance and reconnaissance. The vehicle switches navigation modes according to the vehicle status. It has three guidance modes, which are "Normal", "Road tracking", and "Crossing recognition". A field test result shows that the vehicle can track the planned path within 0.10[m] accuracy at straight paths and within 0.25[m] for curved paths even if RTK fixed solutions are not available. Field experiments and analyses have proved that the proposed navigation method can provide good enough guidance accuracy even under poor satellite visibility and that the panorama image database with absolute position is useful for surveillance.