Abstract
Pulsed ultrasonic distance measurement systems are frequently used in robotics applications, thanks to their low cost and small size. The pulse compression techniques, originally developed by radar engineers, were adopted to eliminate frequent misreadings caused by crosstalk or external ultrasound sources. High-performance computing systems for the implementation of pulse compression techniques enable reliable and accurate distance measurement. In most cases however, they significantly increase the complexity of the total system, cutting down one of the advantages of ultrasonic systems. The ultrasonic ranging using a digital polarity correlator can overcome this drawback, because the cost of realizing delay and multiplication for each point on the polarity correlation function as a parallel operation is very low. This paper presents an analysis of the binary coded frequency shift keyed signals for the ultrasonic ranging using a digital polarity correlator. The spectra of the frequency shift keyed signals have been observed to be narrow compared with the spectra of the corresponding phase shift keyed signals. This suggests the possibility of a more reliable and accurate distance measurement with the frequency shift keyed signals in terms of occupied bandwidth.
