Novel ultrasonic beamforming method based on nonlinear filtering [for mobile robot application]

A new beamforming method appropriate especially for airborne ultrasonics is presented. The method is based on a nonlinear filtering technique called order statistic filtering. By using the proposed method it is possible to implement an ultrasonic range sensing system, for example, for mobile robot applications. The proposed sensing system gives the time-of-flight-based distance measure and the angle of incidence which is computed by applying the delay difference between sensor array elements. Measures are computed for each detected echo per one transmitted ultrasonic burst. The approach offers an efficient computation algorithm and a hardware solution to exploit it in practice