An Ultrasonic Target Identification System Based on Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers

Abstract

In this paper, an ultrasonic target identification system based on Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (PMUTs) is proposed to improve the productivity efficiency of industrial production. The proposed system can accurately identify targets of different shapes. Two pieces of 3 × 3 PMUTs arrays with a resonant frequency of 115 kHz are used as the transmitter and receiver of the PMUTs-based ultrasonic sensor. The sensor is small in size and has high instability. In addition, the PMUTs based ultrasonic sensors have lower environmental requirements than vision sensors and are less expensive than laser sensors. Therefore, the sensors are suitable for large-scale use in industry. The characteristics of the proposed system are investigated in the shape experiments on the square, circle, frame, and ring targets. The four kinds of targets are acrylic plates with a thickness of 5mm. The experimental results show that the system can accurately identify the shapes of the four targets through the grid-based scheme. Besides, the identification process is automatically completed by the 3D mobile platform. The proposed system has demonstrated a cost-effective method to identify targets of different shapes, which can more efficiently guide the robotic manipulator’s grasping and other behaviors.