Mechanical Design and Control System of a Miniature Autonomous Surveillance Robot

Secret surveillance in tightly constrained spaces is demanded in many military and civilian activities, such as cave-in enemy raids and indoor hostage rescue missions. These special applications require a kind of miniature mobile robot to function covertly in highly confined environments. However, the crucial problem resulted from the small volume of miniature robots is the difficulty of packing locomotion, sensing, computing and power subsystems into constrained space. This paper presents the mechanical design and the control system of a miniature autonomous surveillance robot ("BMS-1") for indoor reconnaissance tasks. Several experiments showed that BMS-1 was useful for covert surveillance in confined spaces and can carry out reconnaissance missions on its own or by teleoperation.