Cellular sensor-processor array based visual collision warning sensor

Autonomous UAVs need on-board vision system to be able to navigate, avoid collisions, and execute missions. Small UAVs can carry small form factor vision system with low power consumption due to natural payload limitations. Therefore it is a natural idea to use cellular sensor-processor arrays to implement the necessary vision functions. In this paper, we present a UAV collision warning algorithm and its implementation on a 176×144 sized mixed-signal sensor-processor array. Besides the technical details of the implementation, the paper includes comparison with FPGA implementation of the same algorithm.