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 that cover or surround a set of buildings e.g., in response to an alarm, is needed. In this paper we focus on two problems. The first is how to create a line-of-sight perimeter around a given set of buildings with a minimal number of UGVs. The second problem is how to find UGV positions such that a given set of walls are covered by the cameras while taking constraints in terms of zoom, range, resolution and field of view into account. For the first problem we propose a polynomial time algorithm and for the second problem we extend our previous work to include zoom cameras and furthermore provide a theoretical analysis of the approach itself. A number of examples are presented to illustrate the two algorithms.