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Motion Detection Chips for Robotic Platforms

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Flying Insects and Robots

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Abstract

The on-board requirements for small, light, low-power sensors, and electronics on autonomous micro-aerial vehicles limit the computational power and speed available for processing sensory signals. The sensory processing on these platforms is usually inspired by the sensory information extracted by insects from their world, in particular optic flow. This information is also useful for distance estimation of the vehicle from objects in its path. Custom Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) sensor chips which perform focal-plane motion estimation are beneficial for such platforms because of properties including compactness, continuous-time operation, and low-power dissipation. This chapter gives an overview of the various monolithic analog VLSI motion detection/optic flow chips that have been designed over the last 2 decades. We contrast the pros and cons of the different algorithms that have been implemented and we identify promising chip architectures that are suitable for flying platforms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zürich and ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Rico Moeckel & Shih-Chii Liu

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  1. Rico Moeckel
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  2. Shih-Chii Liu
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Correspondence to Rico Moeckel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland

    Dario Floreano

  2. Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland

    Jean-Christophe Zufferey

  3. Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, 4072, Australia

    Mandyam V. Srinivasan

  4. Dept. Zoology, University Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, United Kingdom

    Charlie Ellington

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Moeckel, R., Liu, SC. (2009). Motion Detection Chips for Robotic Platforms. In: Floreano, D., Zufferey, JC., Srinivasan, M., Ellington, C. (eds) Flying Insects and Robots. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89393-6_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89393-6_8

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