Wireless Video Surveillance Robot using Raspberry Pi

This project builds a Video Surveillance robot that can be controlled via wireless remote control and can be used for video surveillance also.

Video surveillance is the process of monitoring a situation, an area or a person. This generally occurs in a military scenario where surveillance of borderlines and enemy territory is essential to a country’s safety. Human surveillance is achieved by deploying personnel near sensitive areas in order to constantly monitor for changes. But humans do have their limitations, and deployment in inaccessible places is not always possible.

There are also added risks of losing personnel in the event of getting caught by the enemy. With advances in technology over the years, it is possible to remotely monitor areas of importance by using robots in place of humans.

We have developed a robot which can be used for video surveillance & monitoring which can be controlled through a GUI interface. The control mechanism is provided with a video transmission facility. The video transmission is practically achieved through high-speed image transmission. Initially, the robot will be equipped with a camera which will capture the scenes and transfer the images to the server on which the user will be controlling and watching the live feed.

Block Diagram

The brain of the circuit is Raspberry pi. It is single board credit card size computer based on A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU with 1GB RAM.

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It is also equipped with two IR obstacle sensors which allow it to see the obstacles that you can’t, because well, you’re not there. It will detect an object and if the object detected, it will change its direction. As stated before, the robot has quite a few sensors on board. It also has a camera which can be used for video surveillance of human beings.

We have also used a motion sensor to detect human movement. If a human is detected, the system will enable a camera module. It also has an L293 motor driver to allow sufficient current to power the motors via the Raspberry pi GPIO. We have established IoT server which enables to controlled robot from a remote place.

Necessary packages required

• We have flash Raspbian OS in microSD card. Raspbian is a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your Raspberry Pi run.
• We have to control robot from webpage so we need to install necessary package related to server.

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For installation of the apache server do following steps

• sudo apt-get install apache2 –y
• To allow your Apache server to process PHP files, you’ll need to install PHP5 and the PHP5 module for Apache. Type the following command to install these:
• Sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 -y

After installing apache2 server on raspberry pi we can test it by running following link from browser.

http://localhost/ OR http:// “ IP Address of Raspberry Pi”

Browse to the default web page either on the Pi or from another computer on the network and you should see the following:

This means you have Apache working!

This default web page is just a HTML file on the file system. It is located at /var/www/html/index.html.

Now you can remove that index.html file by executing following command.
rm index.html

Copy all the files provided in attached zip file to /var/www/html folder and then run following link on browser from raspberry pi or other device which is connected on same network.

http://localhost/ OR http:// “ IP Address of Raspberry Pi”

Hence you should able to see following robot controlling webpage.