Compact Radar System

Context: Radar was developed in secret during world war II to detectobstacles or any incoming threat. The term radar was coined in 1940by United States Military as an acronym for "Radio Detection andRanging". Using radio waves a radar detects any incoming threat orobstacle [10]. The basic purpose of radar is for monitoring and security. In this work, the ability of an ultrasonic sensor to perform objectidentification and map reconstruction tasks is investigated. Objective: This project aims to design an affordable and reliable ultrasonic radar that rotates 180 degrees. Using certain predeterminedscenarios the sensor is tested for its accuracy and resolution extensively to know its potential to be used in an autonomous mobile robot. This analysis shall further be helpful to calibrate the sensor and build anautonomous mobile robot used for map reconstruction. Methods: Powered by Arduino Uno, the prototype is programmed viaIDE and examined to monitor a void/unknown environment. Whenthe sensor detects an obstacle in its range, the prototype is programmed to alert the user after the scan by displaying it on the plotgenerated on Matlab. Results: From this work the use of ultrasonic sensors for obstacle detection and ambient map reconstruction is determined. The sensorperformed well in accuracy tests for different objects having differentphysical properties. The standard deviation and correlation coefficient are calculated to determine the uncertainty in the ultrasonicscan. Overall a degree of uncertainty is being observed in the results.One possible cause might be due to the effects of variation in environmental parameters. Conclusions: Overall the sensor is precise and accurate in distancemeasurements. Although for the application of building a map-makingautonomous mobile robot, the sensor has failed to prove reliable aloneand further study is required to understand the cause of these uncertain results