Kalman Filter Algorithm Design for HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Sensor Data Acquisition System

In the control system application, the existence of noise measurement may impact on the performance degradation. The noise measurement of the sensor is produced due to several reasons, such as the low specification, external signal disturbances, and the complexity of measured state. Therefore, it should be avoided to achieve the good control performance. One of the solutions is by designing a signal filter. In this paper, the design of Kalman Filter (KF) algorithm for ultrasonic range sensor is presented. KF algorithm is designed to overcome the existence of noise measurement on the sensor. The type of ultrasonic range sensor used is HC-SR04 which is capable to detect the distance from 2 cm to 400 cm. The discrete KF algorithm is implemented using ATMega 328p microcontroller on Arduino Uno board. The algorithm is then tested with different three covariance values of process noise. The test result shows that the KF algorithm is able to reduce the measurement noise of the ultrasonic sensor. The analysis of variance conducted shows that the smaller value of covariance matrix of the process and measured noises, the better filtering process performed. However, this results in a longer generated response time. Thus, an optimization is required to obtain the best filtering performance.