Optoelectronic Ranging Sensor For Robotic Vehicle

Proposed optoelectronic ranging system for robotic vehicle provides information on distances to points in natural scene by use of pinhole mask to sample texture in scene and determines whether portion of scene corresponds to each pinhole in focus (whether it lies at focal distance). System has no moving parts, requires little computation, and consumes only few watts of power. Passive in sense that it does not include any artificial sources of light, relying instead on sunlight reflected from scene.