A Visual Data Fusion to Aerial and Land Robots Odometry

This paper aims the estimation of the robots motion angles through a linear fusion of two visuals information: Horizon Line position and orientation, and Image Optical Flow. The need of integration of movement estimation techniques is due to the fact that the angles estimation using Horizon information is used with efficiency in several works about aerial robots odometry, but this approach does not enable yaw angle estimation. Optical Flow approach enables the estimation of all of the angles and can be used without the presence of Horizon on the vision field, but can fail in situations which its constraints are not complied. Preliminary experiments made with aerial robots proved the efficiency of the presented method. Despite the difference on the degrees of freedom of other types of robots in comparison with aerial robots, this odometry method can be used on all the types of land robots to estimate its movements. Obviously, in particular cases, the land robot movement can be described with less of the three movement angles because the minor degree of freedom of the robot.