Distance Measurement

Hi,

I have a requirement to measure distances.

Imagine a work area which is a square 50 m x 50 m. There is an small object on a pole (height of pole = 3 m). This vertical pole keeps moving around in the work area. When it stops, I wish to measure the distance between the object of the pole to a fixed point ( one of the corners of the square) to an accuracy of plus or minus 0.5mm.

Any guidance will be much appreciated

Hey Bushan,

Interesting, do you know the initial conditions of the pole? The best method I can think of to maintain accuracy to an extremely low error in a range such as that would be a GPS-RTK breakout board. The other option would just be to use an accelerometer or triangulate your position based on the corners using RF, but again, you’ll struggle to get an accuracy of 0.5mm from that distance, that wouldn’t even account for any error in the positioning of the transmitters. Laser rangefinding would be your best bet, my colleague Oliver is looking into what we can do for you here. All the best with your project!

Bryce
Core Electronics | Support

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Hi Bushan,

What you’re describing sounds an awful lot like land surveying. We do have some products which will let you explore the principles of it, but nothing that will achieve that level of accuracy. For ±0.5mm at 50m which is about 0.001% you will need a theodolite, dumpy level, or similar (typically about ±0°0’2s accuracy).

Here’s a couple of Laser distance sensors we have:


Measurement aside, the other part of this is targeting. I’d recommend looking into object tracking with machine vision. Here’s a great blog post based on OpenCV:

Regards,
Oliver
Support | Core Electronics

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