Visibility-Based Planning of Sensor Control Strategies

Abstract.

We consider the problem of planning sensor control strategies that enable a sensor to be automatically configured for robot tasks. In this paper we present robust and efficient algorithms for computing the regions from which a sensor has unobstructed or partially obstructed views of a target in a goal. We apply these algorithms to the Error Detection and Recovery problem of recognizing whether a goal or failure region has been achieved. Based on these methods and strategies for visually cued camera control, we have built a robot surveillance system in which one mobile robot navigates to a viewing position from which it has an unobstructed view of a goal region, and then uses visual recognition to detect when a specific target has entered the region.