A unified strategy for landing and docking using spherical flow divergence
Date
2012
Authors
McCarthy , Christopher
Barnes, Nick
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE Inc)
Abstract
We present a new visual control input from optical flow divergence enabling the design of novel, unified control laws for docking and landing. While divergence-based time-to-contact estimation is well understood, the use of divergence in visual control currently assumes knowledge of surface orientation, and/or egomotion. There exists no directly observable visual cue capable of supporting approaches to surfaces of arbitrary orientation under general motion. Central to our measure is the use of the maximum flow field divergence on the view sphere (max-div). We prove kinematic properties governing the location of max-div, and show that max-div provides a temporal measure of proximity. From this, we contribute novel control laws for regulating both approach velocity and angle of approach toward planar surfaces of arbitrary orientation, without structure-from-motion recovery. The strategy is tested in simulation, over real image sequences and in closed-loop control of docking/landing maneuvers on a mobile platform.
Description
Keywords
Keywords: Arbitrary orientation; Closed-loop control; Control laws; Ego-motion; Kinematic properties; Maximum flows; Mobile platform; Optical flow divergence; Planar surface; Real image sequences; Spherical flow; Structure from motion; Surface orientation; Time-to- optical flow; Robot vision; visual navigation; visuo-motor control
Citation
Collections
Source
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Type
Journal article
Book Title
Entity type
Access Statement
License Rights
Restricted until
2037-12-31