Unmanned air vehicles often produce significant noise from their propulsion systems. Using this broadband signal as "acoustic illumination" for an auxiliary sensing system could make vehicles more robust at a minimal cost. We present an acoustic beamforming-based algorithm that estimates object-relative distance with a small two-microphone array using the generated propulsion system noise of a vehicle. We demonstrate this approach in several closed-loop distance feedback control tests with a mounted quad-rotor vehicle in a noisy environment and show accurate object-relative distance estimates more than 2x further than the baseline channel-based approach. We conclude that this approach is robust to several practical vehicle and noise situations and shows promise for use in more complex operating environments.
翻译:无人机往往会因推进系统产生相当大的噪音。利用这个宽带信号作为一个辅助感应系统的“声学照明”可以在最小的成本下使飞行器更加健壮。我们提出了一种基于声波波束成形的算法,使用飞行器产生的推进系统噪音,利用小型的双麦克风阵列估计物体相对距离。我们在嘈杂的环境中通过几个闭环距离反馈控制测试展示了这种方法,并显示了比基线基于通道的方法更准确的物体相对距离估计,达到了2倍以上。我们得出结论,这种方法对几个实用的飞行器和噪声情况是稳健的,并在更复杂的操作环境中显示出很大的潜力。