Multi-robot autonomous parking security system

Abstract

This paper describes a robotic system for use in parking area security. The system is comprised of two cooperating autonomous vehicles: a large "mothership" robot that is used to perform license plate recognition tasks and that carries and deploys a smaller, low-profile robot that is able to perform under-vehicle inspections with a number of different sensors. The robots are controlled via a multi-resolution, hierarchical, task-decomposition strategy, which is based on a grammar of atomic actions, enabling reactive autonomous decision-making. Experiments with the real robots are also described.