Continuous sonar sensing for mobile mini-robots

Klahold J, Rautenberg J, Rückert U. Continuous sonar sensing for mobile mini-robots. In: Robotics and Automation, 2002. Proceedings. ICRA '02. IEEE International Conference on. Vol 1. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE; 2002: 323-328.Ultrasonic sensors enable mobile autonomous systems to obtain information about obstacles in large environments. In the presented work, a 5cm broad array of three piezo-ceramic ultrasonic transducers is employed for getting two-dimensional impressions of the surroundings. Deviating from the pulse echo measurement techniques used so far the time-continuous transmitting and receiving from modulated pseudo-random sequences are regarded. Thus the narrow bandwidth of a piezo-ceramic transducer can be compensated by an increased measuring period. An advanced analysis of the correlated signals allows the rejection of phantoms caused by multiple reflections. Furthermore, a classification of objects as wall, corner, log or, cylinder is possible