Optical flow based velocity estimation for mobile robots

This paper presents an optical flow based novel technique to perceive the instant motion velocity of mobile robots. The primary focus of this study is to determine the robot's ego-motion using displacement field in temporally consecutive image pairs. In contrast to most previous approaches for estimating velocity, we employ a polynomial expansion based dense optical flow approach and propose a quadratic model based RANSAC refinement of flow fields to render our method more robust with respect to noise and outliers. Accordingly, techniques for geometrical transformation and interpretation of the inter-frame motion are presented. Advantages of our proposal are validated by real experimental results conducted on Pioneer robot.