Insect Inspired Three Dimensional Centring

Abstract

Navigating a robot through confined three-dimensional spaces, such as a helicopter flying within a building containing rooms and corridors, presents some obvious difficulties. This paper presents and experimentally verifies a biologically inspired technique that uses optical flow to perform three-dimensional centring in corridor-like environments. The experiments are performed on an omni-directional mobile robot, which has vertical motion for two fisheye cameras mounted to provide almost 360° vision.