Dragonfly could get “lost” due to different reasons:
- The environment is “too plain” (few objects/shapes) and it is impossible to detect enough features (reference points). Think about an area with many white walls all equal to each other.
- The monocular camera does pure YAW rotations (like a drone rotating around itself) or PITCH rotations. This is a mathematical limit of every computer vision system and it can be overcome by:
- using monocular camera and performing YAW/PITCH rotations in conjunction with translation movements (like a turning car).
- using a stereoscopic camera. Stereoscopic cameras are not affected by this problem.
- The field of view is limited (like on smartphones/tablets). A limited field of view limits the ability to map an environment fluently. This is the reason why when Dragonfly is used in production, the camera must have a FOV between 100° and 180°.
When Dragonfly gets lost it is possible to recover the position by moving the camera to an area already mapped.