GPS and ultrasonic distance sensors for Autonomous Mobile Platform

The real time processing of sensors signal and real time response of control system is crucial for autonomous mobile platforms. One of the assumption in the project, which part is presented in this article, was the cost of the sensor and control system. That’s the reason, that Raspberry Pi platform has been chosen for this purpose. The article describes connection and performance testing performed on two different GPS and ultrasonic distance sensors, which are the part of Autonomous Mobile Platform in the AutoUniMo project. The results shows, that the URM37 V3.2 ultrasonic distance sensor is very reliable device with almost non-existent error in whole measuring range. While the much cheaper HC-SR04 is very easy to implement, thanks to its simple mode of operation but offers less accurate measurements. In case of GPS sensors, the GY-GPS6MV2 has proven to be more accurate than Digilent PmodGPS, so it will be chosen as main GPS sensor for the mobile platform.