An indoor security system with a jumping robot as the surveillance terminal

Mobile robots are now widely used in various surveillance and security applications. But most of them are wheeled and tracked robots that can not work well to overcome stairs, doorsills and other obstacles in cluttered indoor environments. This paper presents the design and implementation of a new indoor security system with a jumping robot as the surveillance terminal. The jumping robot, a gateway and some pyroelectric infrared (PIR) sensor nodes form a ZigBee wireless sensor network (WSN). The sensor nodes are installed above the doors and windows of the house to detect intruders and send intrusion detection messages to the robot. The robot can jump to the sensor coverage area to take photos and send them to the gateway and the home server. The remote house owner will get these photos through Internet. A prototype system has been implemented and some performance tests have been done. Experimental results show that the robot can jump up on a desk of 105cm high to perform the surveillance task. A 3k-byte captured photo can be transmitted to the gateway in 3.68s with 0.1% loss rate by 5 hops¹.