Spotted in the Model Airplane News magazine: an ad for "Flymentor" from Shenzhen KDS Model Technologies. It's a gyro-based helicopter stabilization system with an interesting twist. It includes a CCD camera that looks down, capturing "a ground picture" and holds the heli in one position, presumably by using optical flow.
It's kind of amazing. Don't ask me how it holds altitude, but it does, very well, as this video shows:
Looking at the video he has simply set the throttle stick to a good hover pitch and left it there. You can tell because the machine is getting transitional lift when it attempts to hold position because it's not able to co-ordinate the pitch and cyclic inputs.
The simplest optical flow application is right on your table:Your optical mouse.But is uses only 4x4 matrix.Optical flow basicaly gives you a corespondence between 2 succesive frames in 2D.In other words which point in the first image corespond to a point in the second image based on the intensity values. For your optical mouse you can compute the average values in X direction and Y directon.But for 3d position estimation you will need to guess the overall 3d position.Optical flow is too simple to be considered a autopilot tehnique.Maybe they do a 3d position estimation which involves a lot more.As I know mono-SLAM is currently the fastest camera tracking around.
At least for translation, seems like the only thing stopping us from easily doing this with the guts from an actual optical mouse is having a correct lens. Any ideas on where such a lens could be found?
Comments
Basically German patent office got money for nothing...
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