A High-Resolution Ultrasonic Environmental Sensing Scheme for Indoor Automated Guided Vehicle Obstacle Avoidance

With the advancement of industrial automation and intelligence, the demand for enhanced environmental sensing capabilities in industrial robots, especially Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), is increasingly growing. Consequently, developing cost-effective hardware configurations and efficient algorithms capable of achieving high-resolution environmental sensing for AGVs has become an urgent challenge. To address this challenge, this paper introduces an innovative ultrasonic environmental sensing scheme for AGV obstacle avoidance. This scheme leverages a movable ultrasonic sensor to expand the transceiver aperture, combined with the proposed nonlinear sensing algorithm, to achieve accurate environmental sensing. To tackle the spatial distribution challenge of ultrasonic transducers and microphones, we introduce the concept of an equivalent virtual transceiver. Through simulation experiments, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear sensing algorithm and analyze its theoretical performance, demonstrating its capability to detect multiple obstacle targets within a scene. Compared to existing schemes, the proposed scheme achieves centimeter-level resolution performance within a one-meter range. Moreover, we validate the performance of the proposed ultrasonic scheme and its sensing capabilities for obstacles of different cross-sectional sizes through prototype experiments.