Parallel analog VLSI architectures for computation of heading direction and time-to-contact

Abstract

We describe two parallel analog VLSI architectures that integrate optical flow data obtained from arrays of elementary velocity sensors to estimate heading direction and time-to-contact. For heading direction computation, we performed simulations to evaluate the most important qualitative properties of the optical flow field and determine the best functional operators for the implementation of the architecture. For time-to-contact we exploited the divergence theorem to integrate data from all velocity sensors present in the architecture and average out possible errors.