A thermophone-based FM sonar for airborne ultrasonic sensing under drone flight noise
Yasufumi Yamada, Kanta Hasegawa, Yuma Watabe, Shinichi Sasaki, Takaaki Asada, Shizuko Hiryu · 2026
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Description
Yasufumi Yamada and co-authors build a bat-like sonar for drones in a 2026 paper. Bats steer with one sound sender and two ears, using wide, sweeping tones. Drone rotors make loud noise, so hearing echoes in flight is a hard test.
Their sonar uses a light heat-based sound maker with no ringing parts, so it can send clean sweeping pulses at low voltage. Onboard matching of echoes let the drone spot objects, place them in two dimensions, and dodge slow obstacles by sound alone. It even found narrow posts while rotor noise drowned the raw microphone signal. The team sees the device as a base for future flying sonar.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yasufumi Yamada, Kanta Hasegawa, Yuma Watabe, Shinichi Sasaki, Takaaki Asada, Shizuko Hiryu |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 34 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |