Improvement in the accuracy of estimating the time-of-flight in an ultrasonic ranging system using multiple square-root unscented Kalman filters.

The square-root unscented Kalman filter (SRUKF) is applied to identify the shape parameters of an ultrasonic echo envelope. The SRUKF has better stability than the normal unscented Kalman filter (UKF) because the square-root of the error covariance matrix used in the SRUKF guarantees positive semidefiniteness. Considering the effect of the initial state on the convergence speed of filters, the multi-SRUKF is used to estimate the time-of-flight (TOF). Each SRUKF has a different initial state. The result estimated in a limited time with minimum mean square error is finally adopted. Simulation experiments for various couples of shape parameters and signal-to-noise ratios validate the improvement in the TOF accuracy. Real experiments using the echo signals of a SensComp 600 ultrasonic transducer show that the relative means and standard deviations of the TOF error obtained using the multi-SRUKF method are less than 0.2% and 0.15%, respectively.

Improvement of energy efficiency via spectrum optimization of excitation sequence for multichannel simultaneously triggered airborne sonar system.

Both the energy efficiency and correlation characteristics are important in airborne sonar systems to realize multichannel ultrasonic transducers working together. High energy efficiency can increase echo energy and measurement range, and sharp autocorrelation and flat cross correlation can help eliminate cross-talk among multichannel transducers. This paper addresses energy efficiency optimization under the premise that cross-talk between different sonar transducers can be avoided. The nondominated sorting genetic algorithm-II is applied to optimize both the spectrum and correlation characteristics of the excitation sequence. The central idea of the spectrum optimization is to distribute most of the energy of the excitation sequence within the frequency band of the sonar transducer; thus, less energy is filtered out by the transducers. Real experiments show that a sonar system consisting of eight-channel Polaroid 600 series electrostatic transducers excited with 2 ms optimized pulse-position-modulation sequences can work together without cross-talk and can measure distances up to 650 cm with maximal 1% relative error.