On the usefulness of optical flow for robotic part manipulation

This paper describes experience gained in using optical flow fields, arising from constrained camera motion, to estimate range information, for robotic part manipulation. Several key issues in robot vision are addressed. These include the computation of optical flow, computation of depth, interpolation of depth values, model construction, object recognition, and pose estimation. The paper provides an example of the approach and evaluates the system´s performance in the context of its applicability to part manipulation