Ego-motion Sensor for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on a Single-Board Computer
This provides a low-cost odometry solution for unmanned aerial vehicles, but it is incremental as it builds on similar existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of estimating velocity for micro aerial vehicles by designing a ground-facing camera sensor that uses optical flow and a distance sensor, achieving performance comparable to an existing solution in indoor and outdoor tests.
This paper describes the design and implementation of a ground-related odometry sensor suitable for micro aerial vehicles. The sensor is based on a ground-facing camera and a single-board Linux-based embedded computer with a multimedia System on a Chip (SoC). The SoC features a hardware video encoder which is used to estimate the optical flow online. The optical flow is then used in combination with a distance sensor to estimate the vehicle's velocity. The proposed sensor is compared to a similar existing solution and evaluated in both indoor and outdoor environments.