Ground Speed Sensor development part 1

Preface:

A ground speed sensor is a sensor that measures the speed of a ground vehicle with respect to the ground underneath of it. In this context, the speed is 2 dimensional. 

This sensor measures directly what normally we would be inferring from a variety of sensors such as wheel speed, RTK GPS, etc.

The influence behind this has primarily come from Henri Norden's thesis on a ground speed sensor developed for his formula student car to emulate sensors such as the Kistler Correvit SFII. The reason why I am trying to develop an iteration of this sensor is for getting the ground speed for the Autonomous Go-Kart I lead. 

The initial work:

Previously, I had been focused on sourcing sensors and other hardware for this project however I also started to think how we could actually start the work of developing the software for this sensor that would be running on what will probably end up being a Jetson. For this, I started thinking about the actual output that the camera creates, of which really is mostly all the same texture and is something we could fairly easily simulate with opencv and some asphalt textures from online.

Here is what the initial simulation looks like:

In addition to this simulated camera output, we need to be able to output a ground-truth velocity reference. To do this, we are currently thinking that we might as well reference our velocity to a real-world velocity and use a real-world reference image for our tiled surface. In turn, we decided that we need to create a jig to hold a camera and that camera will be taking a picture of flat ground with a reference object (like a penny) in frame so we can accurately estimate scale.

we may be able to even use an overhead camera jig like this:

Next we need to be able to command a path and velocity for our virtual camera to travel along and be able to visualize within the camera frame the ground truth velocity vector I think with the length of the arrow showing magnitude and the direction of the arrow mirroring the direction of the moving box.

This red arrow could be the ground truth versus say a blue arrow showing the machine vision derived velocity velocity.