Analysis of real-time velocity compensation for outdoor optical mouse sensor odometry

This paper investigates the linearity of optical flow odometry with respect to velocity when using refocused optical mouse sensors for outdoor robotic navigation. Optical mouse sensors are small, inexpensive and contactless devices which include a low resolution CMOS camera, DSP hardware and optical flow firmware to provide optical displacement measurements in two dimensions. We perform experiments using different velocities, sampling periods and with decoupled acceleration to develop a linear, real-time compensation algorithm providing velocity corrected displacement measurements.