One difficulty in robotics is to imbue these systems with vision capabilities similar to that of human beings. The ability to recognize objects, navigate through environments, and other capabilities would greatly increase the breadth of applications for robots and robotic systems. While the dream of robust, human-like robotic vision has not been realized, much progress has been made and specific challenges have been overcome.
Visual odometry (VO) is the process of estimating location based on analysis of data from vision sensors. VO is useful for helping unmanned systems comprehend changes in location in environments where GPS or other localizations may be problematic. In monocular visual odometry, data from a single camera is used for analysis. Monocular VO is an area of increasing interest in military circles because it can be used onboard UGVs with low-cost, non-emissive cameras.
QS has developed proprietary cutting edge VO algorithms and software that enable real-time estimation of position onboard manned or unmanned vehicles. Targeted specifically at military UGVs, QS VO operates in real-time in a variety of outdoor and indoor environments from a monocular video feed. The key component of this system is a novel set of proprietary algorithms developed by QS and termed the "Fast Scene Comparison Framework." The framework is able to compare any two video frames (not necessarily consecutive) and find the common scene elements independent of their positions (and scale) in their respective frames. By leveraging this advanced technology, QS VO is able to overcome many of the issues that plague other VO algorithms and perform very robustly under difficult circumstances.
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If your application could benefit from Visual Odometry, please contact us at robotics@quantumsignal.com. You won't regret it!
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