Estimation of mobile robot ego-motion and obstacle depth detection by using optical flow

Estimation of ego-motion and obstacle depth detection plays an important role in environment recognition for navigation of mobile robots. In this paper obstacle perception is performed by using pattern matching between the planar flow and the normal optical flow observed by means of a monocular vision system installed on a mobile robot. The obstacle depth and robot velocity then can be estimated through the coordinate transformation between the image coordinate and the robot coordinate. An experiment is also performed under several different environment settings and shows a good performance for estimation of velocity and the obstacle depth for a mobile robot.