Discrete Ultrasonic Sensors for Mobile Autonomous Systems

Abstract

Ultrasonic enables a mobile autonomous system to obtain information about obstacles in\nlarge environments. In the presented work, taking the limited energy resources of a mobile robot into\naccount, only one transmitter is used. The employment of two receivers permits the calculation of\nthe distance to and the orientation of a wall, using only time-of-flight measurements. The evaluation\nprocedure consists of basic geometrical calculations, which do not strain the system's calculating\npower too excessively. The results show that it is possible to place the transmitter and the receivers\nclose together without losing much of the performance. Hence the introduced arrangement of\nultrasonic sensors can be used for small systems, e.g. the mini-robot Khepera.