Odometry for Ground Moving Agents by Optic Flow Recorded with Optical Mouse Chips

Optical mouse chips—equipped with adequate lenses—can serve as small, light, precise, fast, and cheap motion sensors monitoring optic flow induced by self motion of an agent in a contrasted environment. We present a device that extracts self motion parameters exclusively from flow in eight mouse sensors. Four pairs of sensors with opposite azimuth are mounted on a sensor head, each individual sensor looking down with −45° elevation. The head is mounted on a carriage and is moved at constant height above a textured planar ground. The calibration procedure and tests on the precision of self motion estimates are reported.