Distance Measurement Technique Using Phase Difference of Two Reflected Ultrasonic Frequencies

This paper proposes a simple method of distance measurement utilizing phase difference of two reflected ultrasonic frequencies. To obtain the phase difference, an alternating signal which contains two sinusoidal signals having different frequencies is fed to an ultrasonic transmitter. When the transmitted signal is reflected and received by the ultrasonic receiver, the received signal is first squared. Then, a time shift property of Fourier transform is applied to the squared signal to acquire the phase difference. The phase difference is converted to a time-of-flight (TOF) value and turned to the distance. To experiment the proposed technique, a DSP TMS620C6713 board is employed to generate the alternating signal as well as to receive the reflected signal, and to process the received signal. In the experiment, two sinusoidal signals having frequencies of 39.85 kHz and 40.6 kHz are used. The results show that the obtained distance by the presented approach has fairly low error only 0.15 centimeters compared to the actual distance.