Direction and Ranging of an Incoming Sound from an Arduino Sound Sensor System

Sound detection and ranging has many applications related to echolocation, navigation, and geolocation. All rely on accurately pinpointing the location of the source with the use of sound delays. For this study, we assembled a device that could pinpoint the location of a sound source with the use of differences in times of arrival of its sound. It consisted of three sound sensors connected to an Arduino circuit board, which sent data to be processed in Python. The device was found to function correctly to some accuracy. We found that the magnitude of its error varied with the relative location of the sound source and sensors. This led to the production of a model for the error that lets the machine generate a two-dimensional probability distribution as a heat map for the location of the sound source by combining any single measurement with the experimentally determined uncertainty in the equipment. The probability distribution generally matched the machine’s actual distribution of outputs.Science, Faculty ofUnreviewedUndergraduat