Hello,
We are designing an autonomous underwater vehicle and evaluating the Blue Robotics Ping Sonar for range measurement to a rear target.
Our proposed setup is an aft-facing horizontal installation, with the goal of measuring the distance from the vehicle to the shore / a boundary behind it. The expected measurement distance is approximately 50 m.
Since Ping Sonar is a single-beam sonar, we would like to confirm whether this is a suitable use case. In particular:
Can Ping Sonar provide reliable returns from a shoreline / wall-like target at 50 m?
How sensitive would detection be to target angle, sloped shoreline geometry, and surface roughness?
Would you expect practical detection performance at 50 m to be robust enough for navigation logic?
Hi @ali476 -
Welcome to the forums!
The Ping sonar has a 25 degree conical beam. If it is pointed horizontally, at a wall 50m away, I think it would measure that distance just fine. If the sonar is particularly shallow, there could be issues with reflections of the air/water surface boundary that confuse the algorithm used in the sonar’s firmware. Similarly, if the slope at 50m range is gradual, not a wall, you may get a strange measurement. The estimated range will be based on the sonar’s interpretation of the strongest echo after the initial “ringing” from firing a ranging pulse. Because the beam is fairly broad, at 25 degrees, the angle of it relative to the target can vary quite a bit before you’d “miss.” You can thing of the ping sending out sound like a flashlight with a conical beam - the area that is illuminated is a larger and larger circle the farther away the surface is that is lit. The area lit by the flashlight is what is reflecting the sound, so you’re essentially taking an average distance to the illuminated region.
You could try installing the open-source firmware variant and tweaking parameters, but I’d first recommend testing and evaluating performance in your application - it may work “out of the box” just fine despite your unique situation.