The control system and experiments of a miniature autonomous reconnaissance robot

Secret autonomous reconnaissance in tightly confined space is needed in many activities, such as cave-in enemy raids and indoor hostage rescue missions. These special tasks require a kind of miniature mobile robot to autonomously function covertly in highly constrained environments. However, the crucial problem resulted from the small volume of miniature autonomous robots is the difficulty of adopting appropriate sensing and computing subsystems in constrained space. This paper presents the control system of a miniature autonomous surveillance robot (“BMS-1”) for indoor reconnaissance missions. Several experiments showed that BMS-1 can carry out autonomous reconnaissance tasks on its own or by teleoperation.