Robotics is one of the most rapidly evolving technologies which has been put to good use in many diverse applications. And today, with the power of artificial intelligence, the ability of a robot to be aware of its surroundings and to think more smartly has made it eligible to perform even more complex tasks. Home security and surveillance is one such task, and deploying a robot with intelligence to monitor home safety is the main objective of this paper. Traditionally, stationary CCTV cameras are installed everywhere in the house. Installation of a lot of these devices is a tedious task and maintaining and monitoring each and every one of them is difficult. In this paper, a smart user friendly surveillance robot is proposed, which can overcome the drawbacks of the conventional method of CCTV. This obstacle avoiding robot can monitor the status of the entire house while the resident is away, namely detecting the presence of burglars and gas leakage from LPG Cylinders. The robot’s design also includes transmission of monitored data to the Thing-Speak IoT Cloud Server, from which the resident receives instant email messages in case of presence of a burglar or excessive gas leakage detected by the robot. The purpose of this robot is to monitor a house, but it can also be used at other places like factories, offices, etc. Thus, this robot is user friendly and also supports real time monitoring, which can be made use of for surveillance tasks in general. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.