Optical flow based velocity field control

Abstract

This work describes a velocity field controller for a mobile platform based on the estimation of its position using odometry. It is a known fact that this approach has an unbounded error attached. The approach here proposed uses a position estimation obtained by odometry, which uses the six components of the velocity calculated on the basis of the displacement vectors resulted from optical flow estimation. The control loop proposed takes the position estimation as reference and performs a velocity field control. Results obtained shows that, for closed trajectories, the tracking error is bounded. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.