Development of a practical foolproof system using ultrasonic local positioning

Abstract

The objective of this research is to develop a prototype for practical foolproof system which can be used in manual assembly processes. For this purpose, a high-performance and low-cost ultrasonic system is proposed to measure 3D positions of an indoor mobile object. Composed of an ultrasonic sender and a receiver, the system employs ultrasonic time-of-flight (TOF) and trilateration to estimate the positions of the object with an accuracy of few centimeters. To calculate three TOFs, ultrasonic signals are processed full-digitally with a low-cost FPGA, which provides high design flexibility keeping both high performance and low noise. Proposed system is autonomous, so there is no need of an external PC and the system development cost becomes low. As an improved thresholding method to calculate the TOFs, this paper proposes a debounce module, designed in the FPGA, to remove the pulse noises generated during the thresholding. The resulting time delay from the debounce is compensated by a microprocessor for calculating actual TOFs. Lastly, the positions of the mobile object are calculated from the TOFs values by trilateration in the microprocessor. In order to remove measurement noises, both moving average filters and Kalman filters are adopted in calculating the TOFs and positions.