# Ego-motion Sensor for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on a Single-Board Computer

## TL;DR

This paper presents a ground-related odometry sensor for micro aerial vehicles that uses a ground-facing camera and a single-board computer with hardware-accelerated optical flow estimation, enabling velocity measurement in various environments.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel odometry sensor combining hardware-accelerated optical flow with a distance sensor on a single-board computer for UAVs.

## Key findings

- The sensor accurately estimates velocity indoors and outdoors.
- Hardware video encoding improves real-time optical flow computation.
- Compared to existing solutions, it offers better performance and integration.

## Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of a ground-related odometry sensor suitable for micro aerial vehicles. The sensor is based on a ground-facing camera and a single-board Linux-based embedded computer with a multimedia System on a Chip (SoC). The SoC features a hardware video encoder which is used to estimate the optical flow online. The optical flow is then used in combination with a distance sensor to estimate the vehicle's velocity. The proposed sensor is compared to a similar existing solution and evaluated in both indoor and outdoor environments.