Print Email Facebook Twitter Vertical Landing for Micro Air Vehicles using Event-Based Optical Flow Title Vertical Landing for Micro Air Vehicles using Event-Based Optical Flow Author Pijnacker Hordijk, B.J. Contributor de Croon, G.C.H.E. (mentor) Faculty Aerospace Engineering Department Control & Operations Programme Control & Simulation Date 2016-12-16 Abstract Small flying robots can perform landing maneuvers using bio-inspired optical flow by maintaining a constant divergence. However, optical flow is typically estimated from frame sequences recorded by standard miniature cameras. This requires processing full images on-board, limiting the update rate of divergence measurements, thus the speed of the control loop and the robot. Event-based cameras overcome these limitations by only measuring pixel-level brightness changes at microsecond temporal accuracy, hence providing an efficient mechanism for optical flow estimation. This thesis presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first research integrating event-based optical flow estimation into the control loop of a flying robot. We extend an existing 'local plane fitting' algorithm to obtain an improved and more computationally efficient optical flow estimation method, valid for a wide range of optical flow velocities. This method is validated for real event sequences. In addition, a method for estimating the divergence from event-based optical flow is introduced, which accounts for the aperture problem. The developed algorithms are implemented in a constant divergence landing controller on-board of a quadrotor. Flight tests demonstrate that, using event-based optical flow, accurate divergence estimates can be obtained over a wide range of speeds. This enables the quadrotor to perform very fast landing maneuvers. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ffa1ec41-3930-4dfe-b454-e11c3517a7f4 Embargo date 2017-12-16 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights (c) 2016 Pijnacker Hordijk, B.J. Files PDF thesis_2016_12_09.pdf 16.93 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:ffa1ec41-3930-4dfe-b454-e11c3517a7f4/datastream/OBJ/view