Towards sophisticated mobile robot sonar sensing using pseudo-random sequences

Conventional time-of-flight sonar sensing is widely used within the autonomous mobile robot research community. One of its most severe problems is known as crosstalk. This paper presents the experimental results of a new approach which allows the robot to operate a set of sonar sensors simultaneously with no frequent misreading caused by crosstalk or external ultrasound sources. This is achieved by carefully designing the emitted bursts, i.e. by using appropriate pseudo-random sequences together with the pulse compression technique well known from radar applications.