Detecting and avoiding frontal obstacles from monocular camera for micro unmanned aerial vehicles
This addresses obstacle avoidance for micro UAVs in potentially unstructured environments, but it is incremental as it builds on existing optical flow methods with specific limitations.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to detect and avoid frontal obstacles using only a monocular camera, by exploiting optical flow as motion parallax, and achieved this with the drone flying at speeds of 1 m/s and altitudes of 1 to 4 meters.
In literature, several approaches are trying to make the UAVs fly autonomously i.e., by extracting perspective cues such as straight lines. However, it is only available in well-defined human made environments, in addition to many other cues which require enough texture information. Our main target is to detect and avoid frontal obstacles from a monocular camera using a quad rotor Ar.Drone 2 by exploiting optical flow as a motion parallax, the drone is permitted to fly at a speed of 1 m/s and an altitude ranging from 1 to 4 meters above the ground level. In general, detecting and avoiding frontal obstacle is a quite challenging problem because optical flow has some limitation which should be taken into account i.e. lighting conditions and aperture problem.