Ranging using ultrasonic waves is applied in
several areas such as robotics, industry and medicine.
Great efforts have been taken in research to improve
the precision of this system. These efforts developed
different techniques to attain more accurate result. To
evaluate the performance of these techniques a
flexible platform is needed to implement them and
then to analyze and compare their performances. In
this framework a novel design and implementation of
a general purpose ultrasonic ranging system is
presented. This system is employed to implement
three different methods they are; simple threshold,
double threshold, and correlation detection. Then we
analyze statistically their experimental results. The
performance of these techniques is compared in terms
of the change of bias, standard deviation, and total
error as a function of range. The experimental results
exhibit the flexibility and simplicity of the proposed
system by which it can be easily adapted to support
other similar applications.