Simultaneous and Multi-frequency Driving System of Ultrasonic Sensor Array for Object Recognition

Ultrasonic sensors are widely used in mobile robot applications to recognize external environments, because they are cheap, easy to use, and robust under varying lighting conditions. However, the recognition of objects using a ultrasonic sensor is not so easy due to its characteristics such as narrow beam width and no reflected signal from a inclined object. As one of the alternatives to resolve these problems, use of multiple sensors has been studied. A sequential driving system needs a long measurement time and does not take advantage of multiple sensors. Simultaneous and pulse coding driving system of ultrasonic sensor array cannot measure short distance as the length of the code becomes long. This problem can be resolved by multi-frequency driving of ultrasonic sensors, which allows multi-sensors to be fired simultaneously and adjacent objects to be distinguished. Accordingly, this paper presents a simultaneous and multi-frequency driving system for an ultrasonic sensor array for object recognition. The proposed system is designed and implemented using a DSP and FPGA. A micro-controller board is made using a DSP, Polaroid 6500 ranging modules are modified for firing the multi-frequency signals, and a 5-channel frequency modulated 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 for each sensor were obtained from filtering of the received overlapping signals and calculation of the time-of-flights.