Patrol course planning and battery station placement for mobile surveillance cameras

Mobile surveillance robots are being used for practical applications, and such mobile robots have gathered attention as an attractive option for video surveillance systems. Several methods for patrol course planning have been proposed, and these methods can generate optimum/approximate patrol courses with certain objectives and conditions such as minimization of observation intervals and the number of cameras. However, these patrol plans do not consider energy consumption. In actual operation, we must consider the power consumption and battery station placement. It is possible to reduce the costs of surveillance systems by reducing the number of battery stations. In this paper, we propose a method for obtaining a patrol course that satisfies the observation constraint, and an optimum location of battery stations, simultaneously. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by applying it to some practical examples of airports and towns.