Infrared Sensor Array Stack - GMU-ASRC/IR-Sensor-Characterization GitHub Wiki

What is an IR sensor

An IR sensor or Infrared is a sensor that uses the IR band of light. It's used to capture heat from objects using cameras in that spectrum, and in our case, transmit and receive Identifying signals for binary sensing.

Our Use Case

We use IR for the flight baskets as they are not visible to humans, cheap, and easy to implement in small areas. They transmit a signal so it can be received elsewhere to trigger an action within the drones. We are tasked to measure the capabilities of these sensors.

Sensor Specifications

The IR sensors we have are tiny LEDs that emit at a frequency of about 56KHz. They are specified to have a radius of 1m. We are tasked to find a rough FOV of each receiver to further put in simulation.

IR sensor array

The array we were given is circular, with an RX(receive) element spaced in uniform 22.5 degree increments around the circle, with TX elements (transmit) spaced in 90 degrees increments.

  • The Tx elements are labeled A-D and there are four of them
  • Each Rx element is labeled as a number, starting from 1 to 0 (after 15). 16 in total.

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IR sensor Stack

The array is to be placed in stack like fashion on the drone. However, the array can operate without it provided it has a base with batteries, a flight controller, and 2.4Ghz Radio.

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How to Start Collecting Data

  1. Make another stack and get one more radio (three in total) and plug the last one into your computer
  2. Power the stacks on and make sure they are reading values present on the screens
  3. Follow the Wiki on how to pass into one of the radio meshes and read the IR Data

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How to interpret the array shown in the PuTTY terminal?

Each element in the array corresponds to a receiver in the array. Index 0 corresponds with receiver 0 up until 15. Within each index, there will be a transmitter identification, as in, if a receiver gets a signal from a transmitter element, it will label it as the identifier of the radio (EX: 23) followed by the letter of transmitter it is within the array (A-D).

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These arrays come in the form of strings and can be processed as such to attain which receivers are activated by certain transmitters.