Robust optical-flow based self-motion estimation for a quadrotor UAV

Robotic vision has become an important field of research for micro aerial vehicles in the recent years. While many approaches for autonomous visual control of such vehicles rely on powerful ground stations, the increasing availability of small and light hardware allows for the design of more indepen...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Grabe, V., Bulthoff, H. H., Giordano, P. R.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Cameras
Estimation
Hardware
Optical imaging
Optical sensors
Robots
Vectors
Online Access:Request full text
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Summary:Robotic vision has become an important field of research for micro aerial vehicles in the recent years. While many approaches for autonomous visual control of such vehicles rely on powerful ground stations, the increasing availability of small and light hardware allows for the design of more independent systems. In this context, we present a robust algorithm able to recover the UAV ego-motion using a monocular camera and on-board hardware. Our method exploits the continuous homography constraint so as to discriminate among the observed feature points in order to classify those belonging to the dominant plane in the scene. Extensive experiments on a real quadrotor UAV demonstrate that the estimation of the scaled linear velocity in a cluttered environment improved by a factor of 25% compared to previous approaches.
ISSN:2153-0858
2153-0866
DOI:10.1109/IROS.2012.6386234