FLIVVER: Fly Lobula Inspired Visual Velocity Estimation Ranging

04/10/2020
by   Bryson Lingenfelter, et al.
0

The mechanism by which a tiny insect or insect-sized robot could estimate its absolute velocity and distance to nearby objects remains unknown. However, this ability is critical for behaviors that require estimating wind direction during flight, such as odor-plume tracking. Neuroscience and behavior studies with insects have shown that they rely on the perception of image motion, or optic flow, to estimate relative motion, equivalent to a ratio of their velocity and distance to objects in the world. The key open challenge is therefore to decouple these two states from a single measurement of their ratio. Although modern SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) methods provide a solution to this problem for robotic systems, these methods typically rely on computations that insects likely cannot perform, such as simultaneously tracking multiple individual visual features, remembering a 3D map of the world, and solving nonlinear optimization problems using iterative algorithms. Here we present a novel algorithm, FLIVVER, which combines the geometry of dynamic forward motion with inspiration from insect visual processing to directly estimate absolute ground velocity from a combination of optic flow and acceleration information. Our algorithm provides a clear hypothesis for how insects might estimate absolute velocity, and also provides a theoretical framework for designing fast analog circuitry for efficient state estimation, which could be applied to insect-sized robots.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 3

page 4

page 5

research
05/10/2018

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with Dynamic Rigid Objects

Accurate estimation of the environment structure simultaneously with the...
research
04/14/2022

Autonomous Satellite Detection and Tracking using Optical Flow

In this paper, an autonomous method of satellite detection and tracking ...
research
06/28/2023

Image-based Visual Servo Control for Aerial Manipulation Using a Fully-Actuated UAV

Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform high-altitude manipulat...
research
05/02/2020

Derivation of a Constant Velocity Motion Model for Visual Tracking

Motion models play a great role in visual tracking applications for pred...
research
12/09/2022

A Computer Vision Method for Estimating Velocity from Jumps

Athletes routinely undergo fitness evaluations to evaluate their trainin...
research
10/12/2020

Robots State Estimation and Observability Analysis Based on Statistical Motion Models

This paper presents a generic motion model to capture mobile robots' dyn...
research
08/14/2019

Joint phase reconstruction and magnitude segmentation from velocity-encoded MRI data

Velocity-encoded MRI is an imaging technique used in different areas to ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset