For applications involving the control of moving vehicles, the recovery of relative motion between a camera and its environment is of high utility. This thesis describes the design and testing of a real-time analog vlsi chip which estimates the focus of expansion (foe) from measured time-varying images. Our approach assumes a camera moving through a fixed world with translational velocity; the foe is the projection of the translation vector onto the image plane. This location is the point towards which the camera is moving, and other points appear to be expanding outward from. By way of the camera imaging parameters, the location of the foe gives the direction of 3-D translation. The algorithm we use for estimating the foe minimizes the sum of squares of the differences at every pixel between the observed time variation of brightness and the predicted variation given the assumed position of the foe. This minimization is not straightforward, because the relationship between the brightn...