On the use of optical flow in mobile robot navigation: the search for a suitable algorithm

This work addresses the use of optical flow to supervise the navigation of mobile robots. The amount of computation, the number of image frames to be stored and the reliability of the optical flow vectors generated should be acquainted for by programming a suitable algorithm for the onboard calculation of the optical flow. Two good candidates to be this algorithm are selected from the literature and are here considered. A slight modification of one of them is here proposed, and thus three algorithms are evaluated. This evaluation is based on two experiments whose results are reported. The conclusion is that the new algorithm here proposed is more suitable for the application.