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Journal Articles Sensors Year : 2017

Time-of-Travel Methods for Measuring Optical Flow on Board a Micro Flying Robot

Abstract

For use in autonomous micro air vehicles, visual sensors must not only be small, lightweight and insensitive to light variations; on-board autopilots also require fast and accurate optical flow measurements over a wide range of speeds. Using an auto-adaptive bio-inspired Michaelis–Menten Auto-adaptive Pixel (M2APix) analog silicon retina, in this article, we present comparative tests of two optical flow calculation algorithms operating under lighting conditions from 6×10−7 to 1.6×10−2 W·cm−2 (i.e., from 0.2 to 12,000 lux for human vision). Contrast “time of travel” between two adjacent light-sensitive pixels was determined by thresholding and by cross-correlating the two pixels’ signals, with measurement frequency up to 5 kHz for the 10 local motion sensors of the M2APix sensor. While both algorithms adequately measured optical flow between 25 ∘/s and 1000 ∘/s, thresholding gave rise to a lower precision, especially due to a larger number of outliers at higher speeds. Compared to thresholding, cross-correlation also allowed for a higher rate of optical flow output (99 Hz and 1195 Hz, respectively) but required substantially more computational resources.
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Dates and versions

hal-01551122 , version 1 (18-04-2018)

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Erik Vanhoutte, Stefano Mafrica, Franck Ruffier, Reinoud J. Bootsma, Julien Serres. Time-of-Travel Methods for Measuring Optical Flow on Board a Micro Flying Robot. Sensors, 2017, 17 (3), pp.571. ⟨10.3390/s17030571⟩. ⟨hal-01551122⟩
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