An Intelligent Ultrasonic Range Finding Sensor for Robotics

Abstract Unlike conventional metrological sensors operating in well-known conditions, the robotic sensors are working in a complex environment influenced by many parameters. This specificity induces new requirements of an intelligent nature for these sensors, in order to provide measurement performances adjusted according to the task context. This objective could be attained by sensor resources, which include diverse configuration capabilities and information exchange with other sources. These ideas are here applied to an ultrasonic range finding sensor, which uses a frequency modulated method providing many sensitive parameters and a redundancy of the distance measurement. The intelligent sensor described is built around a microprocessor board equipped with a specific language PLICAS, which easily allows complex configurations represented by numeric algorithms or fuzzy linguistic rules.