Noise-Resilient Acoustic Low Energy Beacon for Proximity-Based Indoor Positioning Systems.

Proximity-Based Indoor Positioning Systems (PIPSs) are a simple to install alternative in large facilities. Besides, these systems have a reduced computational cost on the mobile device of those users who do not continuously demand a high location accuracy. This work presents the design of an Acoustic Low Energy (ALE) beacon based on the emission of inaudible Linear Frequency Modulated (LFM) signals. This coding scheme provides high robustness to in-band noise, thus ensuring a reliable detection of the beacon at a practical range, after pulse compression. A series of experimental tests have been carried out with nine different Android devices to study the system performance. These tests have shown that the ALE beacon can be detected at one meter distance with signal-to-noise ratios as low as -12 dB. The tests have also demonstrated a detection rate above 80% for reception angles up to 50° with respect to the beacon's acoustic axis at the same distance. Finally, a study of the ALE beacon energy consumption has been conducted demonstrating comparable power consumption to commercial Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. Besides, the ALE beacon search can save up to 9% more battery of the Android devices than the BLE beacon scanning.

Easily-Deployable Acoustic Local Positioning System Based on Auto-Calibrated Wireless Beacons.

Self-calibrated Acoustic Local Positioning Systems (ALPS) generally require a high consumption of hardware and software resources to obtain the user's position at an acceptable update rate. To address this limitation, this work proposes a self-calibrated ALPS based on a software/hardware co-design approach. This working architecture allows for efficient communications, signal processing tasks, and the running of the positioning algorithm on low-cost devices. This fact also enables the real-time system operation. The proposed system is composed of a minimum of four RF-synchronized active acoustic beacons, which emit spread-spectrum modulated signals to position an unlimited number of receiver nodes. Each receiver node estimates the beacons' position by means of an auto-calibration process and then computes its own position by means of a 3D multilateration algorithm. A set of experimental tests has been carried out where the feasibility of the proposed system is demonstrated. In these experiments, accuracies below 0.1 m are obtained in the determination of the receptor node position with respect to the set of previously-calibrated beacons.

3D Indoor Positioning of UAVs with Spread Spectrum Ultrasound and Time-of-Flight Cameras.

This work proposes the use of a hybrid acoustic and optical indoor positioning system for the accurate 3D positioning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The acoustic module of this system is based on a Time-Code Division Multiple Access (T-CDMA) scheme, where the sequential emission of five spread spectrum ultrasonic codes is performed to compute the horizontal vehicle position following a 2D multilateration procedure. The optical module is based on a Time-Of-Flight (TOF) camera that provides an initial estimation for the vehicle height. A recursive algorithm programmed on an external computer is then proposed to refine the estimated position. Experimental results show that the proposed system can increase the accuracy of a solely acoustic system by 70-80% in terms of positioning mean square error.

Electronic nose based on independent component analysis combined with partial least squares and artificial neural networks for wine prediction.

The aim of this work is to propose an alternative way for wine classification and prediction based on an electronic nose (e-nose) combined with Independent Component Analysis (ICA) as a dimensionality reduction technique, Partial Least Squares (PLS) to predict sensorial descriptors and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for classification purpose. A total of 26 wines from different regions, varieties and elaboration processes have been analyzed with an e-nose and tasted by a sensory panel. Successful results have been obtained in most cases for prediction and classification.

Analysis of Doppler effect on the pulse compression of different codes emitted by an ultrasonic LPS.

This work analyses the effect of the receiver movement on the detection by pulse compression of different families of codes characterizing the emissions of an ultrasonic local positioning system. Three families of codes have been compared: Kasami, Complementary Sets of Sequences and Loosely Synchronous, considering in all cases three different lengths close to 64, 256 and 1,024 bits. This comparison is first carried out by using a system model in order to obtain a set of results that are then experimentally validated with the help of an electric slider that provides radial speeds up to 2 m/s. The performance of the codes under analysis has been characterized by means of the auto-correlation and cross-correlation bounds. The results derived from this study should be of interest to anyone performing matched filtering of ultrasonic signals with a moving emitter/receiver.

Modeling the behavior of an underwater acoustic relative positioning system based on complementary set of sequences.

The great variability usually found in underwater media makes modeling a challenging task, but helpful for better understanding or predicting the performance of future deployed systems. In this work, an underwater acoustic propagation model is presented. This model obtains the multipath structure by means of the ray tracing technique. Using this model, the behavior of a relative positioning system is presented. One of the main advantages of relative positioning systems is that only the distances between all the buoys are needed to obtain their positions. In order to obtain the distances, the propagation times of acoustic signals coded by Complementary Set of Sequences (CSS) are used. In this case, the arrival instants are obtained by means of correlation processes. The distances are then used to obtain the position of the buoys by means of the Multidimensional Scaling Technique (MDS). As an early example of an application using this relative positioning system, a tracking of the position of the buoys at different times is performed. With this tracking, the surface current of a particular region could be studied. The performance of the system is evaluated in terms of the distance from the real position to the estimated one.

Ultrasonic array for obstacle detection based on CDMA with Kasami codes.

This paper raises the design of an ultrasonic array for obstacle detection based on Phased Array (PA) techniques, which steers the acoustic beam through the environment by electronics rather than mechanical means. The transmission of every element in the array has been encoded, according to Code Division for Multiple Access (CDMA), which allows multiple beams to be transmitted simultaneously. All these features together enable a parallel scanning system which does not only improve the image rate but also achieves longer inspection distances in comparison with conventional PA techniques.

High-resolution adaptive spiking sonar.

A new sonar system based on the conventional 6500 ranging module is presented that generates a sequence of spikes whose temporal density is related to the strength of the received echo. This system notably improves the resolution of a previous system by shortening the discharge cycle of the integrator included in the module. The operation is controlled by a PIC18F452 device, which can adapt the duration of the discharge to changing features of the echo, providing the system with a novel adaptive behavior. The performance of the new sensor is characterized and compared with that of the previous system by performing rotational scans of simple objects with different reflecting strengths. Some applications are suggested that exploit the high resolution and adaptability of this sensor.

Dispersion relation for air via Kramers-Kronig analysis.

A general expression for the dispersion of acoustic waves in air is obtained by combining the attenuation coefficient given by the ISO:9613-1 standard and the twice-subtracted Kramers-Kronig relation. Good agreement is found with published data of sound velocity at different frequencies and relative humidities. The resulting expression is used to investigate changes in local dispersion with temperature and humidity.

High reliability outdoor sonar prototype based on efficient signal coding.

Many mobile robots and autonomous vehicles designed for outdoor operation have incorporated ultrasonic sensors in their navigation systems, whose function is mainly to avoid possible collisions with very close obstacles. The use of these systems in more precise tasks requires signal encoding and the incorporation of pulse compression techniques that have already been used with success in the design of high-performance indoor sonars. However, the transmission of ultrasonic encoded signals outdoors entails a new challenge because of the effects of atmospheric turbulence. This phenomenon causes random fluctuations in the phase and amplitude of traveling acoustic waves, a fact that can make the encoded signal completely unrecognizable by its matched receiver. Atmospheric turbulence is investigated in this work, with the aim of determining the conditions under which it is possible to assure the reliable outdoor operation of an ultrasonic pulse compression system. As a result of this analysis, a novel sonar prototype based on complementary sequences coding is developed and experimentally tested. This encoding scheme provides the system with very useful additional features, namely, high robustness to noise, multi-mode operation capability (simultaneous emissions with minimum cross talk interference), and the possibility of applying an efficient detection algorithm that notably decreases the hardware resource requirements.