Towards optimal positioning of surveillance UGVs

Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) equipped with surveillance cameras present a flexible complement to the numerous stationary sensors being used in security applications today. However, to take full advantage of the flexibility and speed offered by a group of UGV platforms, a fast way to compute desired camera locations to cover an area or a set of buildings, e.g., in response to an alarm, is needed. Building upon earlier results in terrain guarding and sensor placement we propose a way to find candidate guard positions that satisfy a large set of view angle and range constraints simulataneously. Since the original problem is NP-complete, we do not seek to find the true optimal set of guard positions. Instead, a near optimal subset of the candidate points is chosen using a scheme with a known approximation ratio of O(log(n)). A number of examples are presented to illustrate the approach.