A Study on Monocular Visual Odometry using Parabolic Motion Constraints
Kyohei Otsu, Takao Maeda, Masatsugu Otsuki, Takashi Kubota · The Proceedings of JSME annual Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics (Robomec) · 2016
This paper presents a novel method of monocular visual odometry for a hopping robot, or a hopper. Firstly, a monocular scheme of visual odometry is applied to estimate the relative poses between three frames up to a scale factor. The scale ambiguity is resolved with the parabolic motion constraints of hopping robots. The whole trajectory can be recovered by estimating motion parameters including the initial velocity and angle. The proposed method is validated with synthetic data, and proved that it can accurately estimate the hopping motion with the absolute scale using only a single monocular camera.