Implementation of Acoustic Sensor Network for Relative Positioning System

This work presents the development and implementation of an acoustic sensor network mainly proposed for relative positioning of mobile robots and autonomous modules. The system consists of several objects to be located, each one of them with an acoustic sensor node. Every node has the required technology in order to compute its position, by using only acoustic emissions as ranging mechanism; this reduces the complexity in the hardware to be implemented. Direct Sequence Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) techniques are used to allow simultaneous emission from several objects, so spatial relations among objects can be measured in a shorter time. Using the data collected by the proposed ranging mechanism, a relative positioning algorithm is computed with the aim of obtaining the positions among objects.