Ultrasonic echo signals obtained in the outdoor environment
Michael J. Anderson, Jeffrey Luke, John Canning, Dean B. Edwards · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1998
Many, if not most, applications of ultrasonic transducers in air are for ranging systems used in a relatively structured environment. We describe the application of ultrasonic transducers to range sensing for a robotic autonomous vehicle that is intended to operate outdoors in a forested environment. Unlike the indoor environment, application of ultrasonic ranging outdoors involves a much more cluttered environment. The outdoor environment contains a large number of categories of objects and features, as well as a wide variation within each category. In this talk, a statistical summary of echoes obtained from features including ground contour, roughness elements, and obstacles common in the forest environment is presented. Information that can be extracted from the echo data that is useful to an autonomous controller is then discussed.