An optical navigation sensor for micro aerial vehicles

This paper describes a catadioptric microsensor for multidirectional imaging and 3D egomotion computation. Inspired by the wide viewing angle of insects’ compound eyes, we show how to extract egomotion information from spherical images. We demonstrate how reflective surfaces can be used for building a compact, multidirectional eye that enables to collect video from 60% of the full sphere. Some experiments performed on synthetic images (using a ray-tracing environment) are presented to validate the concept. We have called the resulting imaging system SICONS (SIngle Chip Optical Navigation Sensor). SICONS is intended for application in micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs) to develop their perceptive, visual guidance and motive abilities to move within the real world in the same way an insect does.