Improvement of Wide-Field-Integration of Optic Flow Considering Practical Sensor Restrictions
Naoto Kobayashi, Mai Bando, Shinji Hokamoto · Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Automation · 2017
This study discusses motion estimation processes for vehicles by Wide-Field-Integration (WFI) of optic flow. Optic flow is a vector field of relative motion between the vehicle and environment, and WFI of optic flow is a bioinspired estimation method to make it robust even for unknown environments. This paper re-examines the form of sensitivity functions used in the WFI of optic flow, which plays a key role in the robust estimation process. Furthermore, since optic flow is obtained from real image sensors, the effects of several restrictions of practical sensors are investigated in numerical simulations. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed form of sensitivity functions is experimentally verified by using real sensors boarded on a flying vehicle.