Toward Refocused Optical Mouse Sensors for Outdoor Optical Flow Odometry

This paper investigates the use of refocused optical mouse sensors for odometry in the field of outdoor robotic navigation. Optical mouse sensors like the ADNS-2610 are small, inexpensive, non-contact devices, which integrate a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor camera and DSP hardware to provide 2-D optical displacement measurements. Current research indicates that vertical height variance contributes as a dominant cause of systematic error to horizontal displacement measurements, which raises significant problems for irregular environments encountered in outdoor robotic navigation. In this paper, we propose two approaches to mitigate this systematic error induced by height variance. The efficacy and robustness of the proposed approaches are tested by experimentation on an asphalt concrete road surface and by simulation.