Estimation method for time to contact from visual information &amp;#x2014; A simple approach that requires no recognition of objects

Kawai, Yuichi; Ito, Kazuyuki

doi:10.1109/robio.2014.7090375

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Recently, the shift of pixel has been utilized to estimated the time-to-contact with good estimation results [22,23]. In addition, Horn et al proposed a new method to estimate the time-to-contact without relying on feature extraction and tracking, and we call it featureless method in this paper [24,25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bio-inspired vision based robot control using featureless estimations of time-to-contact

Zhang

Zhao

2017

Bioinspir. Biomim.

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Marvelous vision based dynamic behaviors of insects and birds such as perching, landing, and obstacle avoidance have inspired scientists to propose the idea of time-to-contact, which is defined as the time for a moving observer to contact an object or surface if the current velocity is maintained. Since with only a vision sensor, time-to-contact can be directly estimated from consecutive images, it is widely used for a variety of robots to fulfill various tasks such as obstacle avoidance, docking, chasing, perching and landing. However, most of existing methods to estimate the time-to-contact need to extract and track features during the control process, which is time-consuming and cannot be applied to robots with limited computation power. In this paper, we adopt a featureless estimation method, extend this method to more general settings with angular velocities, and improve the estimation results using Kalman filtering. Further, we design an error based controller with gain scheduling strategy to control the motion of mobile robots. Experiments for both estimation and control are conducted using a customized mobile robot platform with low-cost embedded systems. Onboard experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, with the robot being controlled to successfully dock in front of a vertical wall. The estimation and control methods presented in this paper can be applied to computation-constrained miniature robots for agile locomotion such as landing, docking, or navigation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%