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Insect-inspired high-speed motion vision system for robot control

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Abstract

The mechanism for motion detection in a fly’s vision system, known as the Reichardt correlator, suffers from a main shortcoming as a velocity estimator: low accuracy. To enable accurate velocity estimation, responses of the Reichardt correlator to image sequences are analyzed in this paper. An elaborated model with additional preprocessing modules is proposed. The relative error of velocity estimation is significantly reduced by establishing a real-time response-velocity lookup table based on the power spectrum analysis of the input signal. By exploiting the improved velocity estimation accuracy and the simple structure of the Reichardt correlator, a high-speed vision system of 1 kHz is designed and applied for robot yaw-angle control in real-time experiments. The experimental results demonstrate the potential and feasibility of applying insect-inspired motion detection to robot control.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Automatic Control Engineering (LSR), Technische Universität Muenchen, Theresienstrasse 90/Building N5, 80290, Munich, Germany

    Haiyan Wu, Ke Zou, Tianguang Zhang & Kolja Kühnlenz

  2. Department of Systems and Computational Neurobiology, Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Am Klopferspitz 18, 82152, Martinsried, Germany

    Alexander Borst

Authors
  1. Haiyan Wu
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  2. Ke Zou
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  3. Tianguang Zhang
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  4. Alexander Borst
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  5. Kolja Kühnlenz
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Correspondence to Haiyan Wu.

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Wu, H., Zou, K., Zhang, T. et al. Insect-inspired high-speed motion vision system for robot control. Biol Cybern 106, 453–463 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-012-0509-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-012-0509-3

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