A method for accurate detection of time of arrival: Analysis and design of an ultrasonic ranging system

Abstract

Many industrial applications demand accurate ranging operations, for example, robotic endeffector positioning and measurement of vibrations in machine monitoring tasks. For instance, measurement of the position of a robotic end effector in high-accuracy applications demands the following stringent specifications from a ranging system: ( 1 ) absolute ranging accuracy of +_ 0.025 mm ( q-0.001 in. ), (2) working range of approximately 2 m (6.56 ft), (3) update rate > 100 Hz, and (4) high reliability. It is shown that an ultrasonic ranging system that meets the above specifications may be feasible. The system model is based on measuring the distance between a transmitter and a receiver. A novel method to detect the instant when the signal arrives at the receiver is described. The method combines envelope peak detection and phase measurement to determine the time of arrival, and it gets close to meeting the accuracy criteria. To verify the analytical predictions, distances of up to 0.9 m were measured using a prototype system. The absolute accuracy of such measurements was q-0.150 mm ( q-0.006 in. ). The tests performed indicate that the errors are caused primarily by air turbulence and may be decreased by averaging more samples. In this paper ultrasonic ranging from a transmitter to a receiver in a three-dimensional space setting is addressed.

Ultrasound-based robot position estimation

“…This method is quite insensitive to both reflections and amplitude variations. The observation was also made by Lamancusa and Figueroa [5], [6], [7] and Sasaki, Takano and Akeno [11]. The latter claim an accuracy of 0.06% of the range, limited by air turbulences.…”

“…Lamancusa and Figueroa [5], [6], [7] addressed some of the problems connected with 3-D ultrasound ranging. In particular, they measured the position measurement error due to the finite transducer size, for some special situations.…”

Design and in vitro evaluation of a real-time catheter localization system using time of flight measurements from seven 3.5 MHz single element ultrasound transducers towards abdominal aortic aneurysm procedures

“…TOA detection is an active area of research. Peak detection and cross-correlation based approaches have been used to find TOA for acoustic source localization [23,24]. However, these methods can suffer in reverberant and multipath environments.…”

Repulsive force control based on distance computation algorithm

“…A variety of approaches have been proposed to solve the problem of manipulator collision avoidance. Many of them used visual or sensor technique (Figueroa, 1992;Fredslund & Mataric;Hashimoto, Kimoto, Ebine, & Kimura, 1991;Schweikard, Bodduluri, & Adler, 1998;Skaar, Brockman, & Hanson, 1987;Skaar, Brockman, & Jang 1990). More recently, with increased computing power, more designs use the computed-distance technique, in which distance between manipulator and obstacle is computed using distance determination algorithm (Bernabeu & Tornero, 2000;Ong, 1996;Ong & Huang, 1998;Turnbull & Cameron, 1998).…”