Simultaneous Driving System of Ultrasonic Sensors Using Codes

Abstract

Ultrasonic sensors are widely used in mobile robot applications to recognize external environments by virtue that they are cheap, easy to use, and robust under varying lighting conditions. In most cases, a single ultrasonic sensor is used to measure the distance to an object based on time-of-flight (TOF) information, whereas multiple sensors are used to recognize the shape of an object, such as a comer, plane, or edge. However, the conventional sequential driving technique involves a long measurement time. This problem can be resolved by pulse coding of ultrasonic signals, which allows multi-sensors to be emitted simultaneously and adjacent objects to be distinguished. Accordingly, this paper presents a new simultaneous coded driving system for an ultrasonic sensor array for object recognition in autonomous mobile robots. The proposed system is designed and implemented. A micro-controller unit is implemented using a DSP, Polaroid 6500 ranging modules are modified for firing the coded signals, and a 5-channel coded signal generating board is made using a FPGA. To verify the proposed method, experiments were conducted in an environment with overlapping signals, and the flight distances fur each sensor were obtained from the received overlapping signals using correlations and conversion to a bipolar PCM-NRZ signal.