Vertical Landing for Micro Air Vehicles using Event-Based Optical Flow

Understand

Small flying robots can perform landing maneuvers using bio-inspired optical flow by maintaining a constant divergence.

• However, optical flow is typically estimated from frame sequences recorded by standard miniature cameras.
• This requires processing full images on-board, limiting the update rate of divergence measurements, and thus the speed of the control loop and the robot.
• Event-based cameras overcome these limitations by only measuring pixel-level brightness changes at microsecond temporal accuracy, hence providing an efficient mechanism for optical flow estimation.