昆虫视觉启发的光流复合导航方法

昆虫能够使用视觉感受的光流(Optical flow, OF)信息执行导航任务. 启发于昆虫的视觉导航, 本文提出了一种生物视觉启发的光流复合导航方法, 它由光流导航和光流辅助导航两部分组成, 以实现高效精确的视觉导航定位. 该方法中, 光流导航的作用是使用昆虫视觉启发的光流法, 测量系统每一时刻的运动位移, 然后使用路径积分累加位移得到位置信息; 光流辅助导航的作用是针对路径积分会产生累积误差的缺点, 使用光流匹配的方法来估计和修正导航中的位置误差. 该光流辅助导航也参考了昆虫启发的光流法, 通过基于光流的卡尔曼滤波器来执行实际和预测光流的迭代匹配. 由于光流导航和光流辅助导航中的光流计算来源于同一昆虫启发光流法, 使得光流复合导航的两部分可共享输入信号和部分执行过程. 文中使用移动机器人进行导航实验,证明了该复合导航方法的效率.

An Optical Flow-based Composite Navigation Method Inspired by Insect Vision

Many insects can use optical flow (OF) for various navigational tasks. Inspired by the OF navigation strategies of insects, this paper develops an OF-based composite navigation method for more efficient and precise visual location. The composite navigation method is composed of an OF navigation and an OF aided navigation. The OF navigation is to measure motion at each step using an insect inspired OF method and the current position information is then obtained by path integration. As path integration can lead to increasing cumulative position errors, the OF aided navigation is thus employed to correct the position errors. This aided navigation implements an OF-based Kalman filter by studying the insect inspired OF method. It can iteratively match the actual and the predicted OF for a continuous error estimation. The OF navigation and the OF aided navigation are derived from the same OF method so that they can share input signals and some operations in navigation. Experiments using a mobile robot have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed composite navigation method.