Obstacle avoidance in flight via optical flow

This video shows our prototyped flight simulation and controller software that

  1. simulates the flight dynamics of an RC aircraft and
  2. automatically controls that aircraft so that it avoids obstacles (ground/mountains etc.), only by analysing the optical flow in front of the aircraft. For the optical flow sensor, an optical mouse CCD (20×20 pixels) with a lense is simulated.  

Also click here to see how the same technique is used in 2D to navigate a robot, only by optical flow.