An ultrasonic sound intelligent sensor for a mobile robot perception system. Principles, design and experimentations

Reactive real-time embedded systems are pervasive in the electronics system industry. Vehicle control or remote sensing are applications where specifications may change continuously, and time-to-market strongly affects success. This calls for the use of software programmable components with behaviour that can be fairly easily changed. Formal verification and automatic synthesis of implementations are emerging technologies but today, embedded systems are still designed with an ad hoc approach that is heavily based on earlier experience with similar products and on manual design. We report on the specification and design of an ultrasonic intelligent sensor able to perceive its environment in terms of plans, edges and corners. We focus more particularly on the sensor design which follows a hierarchical modular decomposition approach in order to satisfy specification requirements.