  Robust velocity and position estimation is crucial for autonomous robot
navigation. The optical flow based methods for autonomous navigation have been
receiving increasing attentions in tandem with the development of micro
unmanned aerial vehicles. This paper proposes a kernel cross-correlator (KCC)
based algorithm to determine optical flow using a monocular camera, which is
named as correlation flow (CF). Correlation flow is able to provide reliable
and accurate velocity estimation and is robust to motion blur. In addition, it
can also estimate the altitude velocity and yaw rate, which are not available
by traditional methods. Autonomous flight tests on a quadcopter show that
correlation flow can provide robust trajectory estimation with very low
processing power. The source codes are released based on the ROS framework.
