New Zealand Personal Robotics Group
Awhile back I’d tested out the PWM3901 Optical Flow Sensor , a Breakout Garden board from Pimoroni . Its a vision sensor that contains a tiny camera, typically used on flying drones. Coupled with a drone’s GPS sensor and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), an optical flow sensor assists in navigational control by observing the motion of the ground below it, taking successive pictures and comparing how far an image has moved relative to the previous one. Since the camera itself doesn’t know how far it is from t
Since the PWM3901’s chip was designed for drones, its camera’s effective range is 80mm to infinity. This means that if used on a ground-based robot its lens must be at least 80mm from the ground, and its view must not be impeded. This can pose a challenge for the design of a robot, whose bottom must either be at least 80mm from the ground or contain a large open area for the sensor, ideally right in the center of the robot. But even then we’d be using the sensor at the extreme lower limit of its range; it’s