Have you ever thought about how robots detect proximity to walls? The answer is ultrasonic sensing. Ultrasonic sensing devices emit sound waves, which bounce off of walls or obstacles, and count the amount of time it takes for those sound waves to return to the device. With this information, ultrasonic sensing devices can measure the distance to a wide range of objects regardless of shape, color, or surface texture!
The first part of this workshop focuses on teaching students how ultrasonic sensors work. Once students finish a short lesson on ultrasonic sensing, they begin working on a mini-project that utilizes Arduino technology to detect the distance to objects. After each student completes the mini-project, they move on to a larger project. The larger project uses the ultrasonic sensor to detect the distance and a light-emitting diode (LED) array to display whether that object is far or close from the user.
By the end of this two-hour workshop, students will have a deep understanding of ultrasonic sensing and C/C++ programming, and how they can modify the code to do various things with the ultrasonic sensor and LED array!
Principal Investigator
Members
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF-CNS-2322919, NSF-OAC-23313738, NSF-CAREER-23313737, NSF-SPX-2202859).