Proceedings of the ASME 2018
Dynamic Systems and Control Conference
USING COMPRESSIVE SENSING WITH IN-AIR ULTRASONIC MEASUREMENTS
FOR ROBOTIC MAPPING
Sean R. Sanchez
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Email: srsanche@bu.edu
ABSTRACT
Robotic mapping and simultaneous localization and map-
ping (SLAM) typically rely on sensors that produce a large num-
ber of measurements at many locations in an environment to pro-
duce an accurate map and, in the case of SLAM, the pose of the
robot in that map. However, with the advent of small, low-power
robots with insect-scale features, there is a need for techniques
that can produce useful maps using limited capability sensors
and a small number of measurements. In this work, we focus
on the use of compressive sensing to extract local environment
reconstructions from ultrasonic sensor measurements. We first
examine a simplistic setting where a square pulse is emitted and
use the returned echoes in a compressive sensing scheme to re-
construct the locations of objects inside the sensing cone. We
then extend this to the more practical setting, accounting for the
wave nature of the acoustic signal and corresponding issues of
interference, showing that these can be accounted for in design-
ing the measurement matrix of the compressive sensing descrip-
tion of the problem. We demonstrate the performance of our
approach though several simulations.
1 INTRODUCTION
Robotic mapping is an important component in the develop-
ment of autonomous robots. There are various of algorithms that
allow robots to reliably use on-board sensors to map their envi-
ronments [1]. Typically, mapping is done using laser rangefind-
ers, cameras, or other powerful sensors that provide a wealth of
1 Copyright © 2018 ASME
Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use
DSCC2018
September 30-October 3, 2018, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
DSCC2018-9140
Sean B. Andersson
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Division of Systems Engineering
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Email: sanderss@bu.edu
data at each robot position. As the robot moves through the en-
vironment, a large volume of data is collected and analyzed (typ-
ically on-line) to produce accurate and useful maps. If, in addi-
tion, the pose of the robot is unknown a priori, then the problem
is one of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). The
literature on SLAM is vast and a comprehensive overview of its
many incarnations and variations can be found in [2].
This paradigm of acquiring large sets of data to produce
maps, however, is not applicable in every robotic scenario. In
recent years, there has been increasing interest and ongoing de-
velopments in very small, low power robots such as autonomous
flying micro-robots (RoboBees) [3], micro air vehicles [4], bat-
like robots [5], and insect-scale flapping wing robots [6]. It is
not feasible to carry or to power large sensors on such platforms
nor to handle or store large sets of data. Even without the ability
to synthesize large numbers of sensor measurements into maps,
autonomous navigation can feasibly be done with very limited in-
formation using techniques such as optical or echoic flow [7, 8],
landmarks [9], or similar approaches. However, it is conceivable
that one would like to deploy one, or more likely, many such
robots in an environment to collect data and then return to a cen-
tral hub to generate a large scale map. Because of limited storage
and power on-board, ideally one needs a light, low-powered sen-
sor and algorithms that can generate the most information out of
each sensor measurement while also producing good maps from
heavily undersampled data.
In this work, we focus on ultrasonic sensors. These are low-
cost, light-weight sensors that have been used in both mapping
 and SLAM [10]. They are typically used to measure a range
to the nearest target, but, unlike laser rangefinders, their signal
expands through an approximately conic domain in space. As
a result there is significantly more information in the received
signal about the environment than simply the range to the near-
est target. This can certainly be seen in the medical environment
where ultrasound is often the modality of choice for safe, in-body
imaging [11]. However, the propagation medium, scale, and set-
ting of ultrasonics for robotic mapping are quite different than
in the medical setting. Perhaps a better motivation for extract-
ing more information from these acoustic signals is the ability of
some people to produce clicks with their mouths and to use the
echoes to learn the local environment around themselves [12].
This idea was expanded upon in recent work to infer the shape
of a polyhedral room from a single source and multiple sensors
(that is, to “hear the shape of a room” ) [13] and on performing
SLAM using these echoes [14]. These results, however, assume
fairly simplistic room geometry and uncluttered environments,
focusing on echoes from the bounding walls.
For any sensor modality (or combination of modalities) there
are various ways to represent the world, including the broad cat-
egories of occupancy grids [15], semantic maps [16], and topo-
logical maps [17]. In this work we focus on occupancy grids
because they are common, effective, and simple to work with.
An occupancy grid is a discrete, gridded map of the world where
each cell is either occupied (in which case it is assigned a one)
or not (in which case it is assigned a zero) or, more generally,
where each cell contains a probability that it is occupied. By
thinking of each cell as a pixel, an occupancy grid can be con-
sidered as an image. The problem we formulate, then, is one of
reconstructing an image from a small number of samples of that
image. One powerful paradigm for reconstructing signals from
undersampled data is that of Compressive Sensing (CS).
The essential idea of CS is that many signals of interest are
sparse when represented in an appropriate basis. The vector of
coefficients describing the signal in that basis consists primarily
of zeros (or, more generally, of primarily very small coefficients).
Reconstruction takes advantage of this through solving a nonlin-
ear optimization problem that can, under certain assumptions,
exactly recreate the original signal [18]. Typically, a measure-
ment in the CS framework is an inner product between a signal
and a measurement vector. If that signal is an image, for exam-
ple, each measurement is a linear combination of the values in
many pixels.
Unfortunately, in robotic mapping with occupancy grids the
sensors used typically return values of individual pixels, not lin-
ear combinations of pixels. This single pixel scenario does not
naturally fit into the standard CS framework. However, this does
not imply that accurate reconstruction can not be done from such
single pixel measurements. In related work, one of the authors
has successfully developed CS-based schemes for dramatically
reducing the number of measurements needed to produce ac-
2 Copyright © 2018 ASME
Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use
curate images in atomic force microscopy (AFM) [19–21]. In
this setting, a sharp tip (with an end radius on the order of
nanometers) is brought into contact with a sample surface and
an image is generated by scanning the tip and measuring each
pixel in sequence. Significant improvement in imaging time
can be achieved by replacing the scanning with appropriate sub-
sampling combined with CS-based reconstruction. These results
give some credence to the belief that CS can be used in the
robotic mapping framework despite the inability of the sensors
to acquire linear combinations in pixels.
This view is further supported by recent work on using CS to
reconstruct depth scans and perform SLAM with a limited num-
ber of measurements [22]. The essential idea in this work is to
reconstruct an entire depth profile (such as is typically measured
by a lidar scan or camera) from a small number of depth mea-
surements. This profile can then be sent to any SLAM algorithm
to produce a map and robot trajectory. There is, however, an
assumption of a regular environment (that is, one with many pla-
nar surfaces and few edges) in their reconstruction scheme. In
addition to assuming regular environments, the number of mea-
surements used at a given time are fairly minimal, and the recon-
struction time doesn’t suffer. However in [23, 24] in the context
of radar-based imaging, a very large (or even infinite) signal is
reconstructed by breaking up the problem up into smaller sub-
problems. Both works take advantage of the idea that the signal
will have finite support over a given time window, and the banded
matrix structure this assumption creates allows the reconstruction
assurances of CS to be extended to these otherwise prohibitively
large signals.
In this paper, we assume a robot is outfitted with an ultra-
sonic sensor and is moving through a two-dimensional environ-
ment. Due to the physics of ultrasonic sensors, each measure-
ment acquires information in a cone. We focus here primarily on
the question of how to reconstruct the environment inside that
cone as effectively as possible using a single pulse of sound,
though we do also briefly consider how to merge information
from multiple pulses at multiple locations, whether from a sin-
gle or from multiple robots. We begin in Sec. 2 with a brief
overview of compressive sensing to set notation and concepts
and in Sec. 3 we formulate and solve the problem of environ-
ment reconstruction in the measurement cone. There we begin
with a simple, abstract setting before introducing some of the
physical complexities encountered in the practical application of
the technique.
2 Overview of Compressive Sensing
There are several good tutorials and overviews on the sub-
jects of sparse representation and compressive sensing (CS) in
the literature, including [25–29]. We give here a brief overview
sufficient to motivate our approach and refer the interested reader
to those sources for more information.
 Compressed sensing [18] is a signal processing technique
which aims at signal reconstruction with significantly fewer mea-
surements than the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem requires.
It takes advantage of the approximate sparsity of real-world sig-
nals, that is, of the observation that many coefficients of such sig-
nals are close to zero when represented in an appropriate basis.
In CS, a signal is reconstructed from measurements by solving
an `1 minimization problem given by,
min kqk1 subject to y = Φx = ΦΨq , Aq
where x ∈ Rn is the true signal, y ∈ Rm is the collection of obser-
 T
 Φ = φ1 φ2 . . . φm is an m × n measurement nmatrix,
vations,
Ψ = ψ1 ψ2 . . . ψn is an n × n orthonormal basis for R (often
referred to as the sparsity basis, and q is the sparse representation
of the true signal x in the domain of Ψ. We define the product
ΦΨ as the m × n matrix A.
The signal x is said to be k–sparse if only k of the elements
of q are non-zero. In practice, few real signals are truly sparse,
and the choice of basis has a nontrivial effect on sparsity. Many
signals however, are approximately sparse or compressible, such
that the sorted magnitudes of the elements of q decay rapidly
[30]. Mathematically, a signal x is compressible in the basis Ψ if
it satisfies,
x = Ψq, |qsort |(i) ≤ R · i−r
where |qsort |(i) is the ith largest magnitude entry of q, r is a con-
stant that defines the speed of the decay and R is a constant.
Given a signal x, it has been shown that the k–sparse approxi-
mation x̂ that minimizes the error
kx − x̂k p
for any ` p norm is the one given by thresholding, that is retaining
just the k largest elements [31].
Under standard data acquisition, the full n–sample signal x is
first acquired. It can then be compressed by calculating the basis
coefficients and then storing only the k largest. The fundamental
idea of CS is to directly acquire a compressed signal without
first sampling the full set of n samples. The challenge, of course,
is that the location of the significant coefficients is not known
a priori. Surprisingly, despite this, it is possible to produce an
accurate, even exact, reconstruction of the original signal using
far fewer than n measurements.
2.1 Measurement acquisition
As stated above, m measurements are taken from the true
signal x through the measurement matrix Φ. Ideally, Φ exactly
Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use
models the physical nature of the measurements taken. In order
to guarantee exact reconstruction, the combined A matrix should
satisfy the restricted isometry property (RIP) [32]. Satisfying
RIP is very specific and, for a given sensing modality, impractical
or impossible, so a more relaxed requirement is that Φ is inco-
herent with respect to the chosen basis Ψ. In essence, this means
that the rows of Φ cannot sparsely represent the columns of Ψ
and vice versa, and intuitively it means that the m measurements
contain sufficient information about the sparse (or compressible)
(1) representation of the signal to enable its accurate reconstruction.
To illustrate the need for this relaxed requirement, we briefly
consider the domain of AFM, where the goal of using CS is to re-
duce the amount of time it takes to measure the topology a nano-
scale sample. One approach to ensuring incoherence is to choose
Φ as a random matrix from a suitable distribution (e.g., choos-
ing each entry according to a uniform Bernoulli distribution or
a zero-mean, 1/n–variance Gaussian distribution [33]) which en-
sures incoherence (and RIP) with high probability. However, a
measurement in AFM involves moving the tip of the instrument
to a particular location and, as a result, only a single pixel of
an image can be acquired at any given time. Thus, translating a
random matrix into physically meaningful measurements would
effectively lead to randomly measuring every point of the sample
and mixing the measurements. Since every pixel was measured,
it would be faster to just perform a standard raster-scan of the
tip across the surface. Instead, one selects a random subset of
the pixels to measure to reduce the overall imaging time with the
tradeoff of increasing the coherence of the measurement matrix
with the sparsity basis.
In general, it is also important to note that the measurement
process is non-adaptive; the measurement matrix is selected be-
forehand and remains fixed. There is, however, existing work on
developing adaptive measurements [34, 35]
2.2 Signal reconstruction
The reconstruction of the signal x from the measurements
y is achieved by solving a nonlinear optimization problem (1).
It has been shown that under appropriate assumptions, the so-
lution to the `1 optimization problem will exactly reconstruct
a k–sparse vector and well approximate a compressible vector
using O(k log(n/k)) measurements. This convex optimization
problem can be solved using a variety of different algorithms,
including basis pursuit and greedy, stochastic, and variational al-
gorithms [26].
In the presence of noise, it makes sense to relax the con-
straints somewhat. In that setting, a common approach is to solve
the optimization problem given by
q̂ = arg min kqk1 subject to ky − Aqk2 < ε (2)
where ε is a user-defined parameter establishing an upper limit
3 Copyright © 2018 ASME
 on the magnitude of the noise. This is once again a convex pro-
gramming problem that can be solved by a variety of techniques.
If the underlying data set represents an image, one often uses
a variant of the `1 minimization which relies on the fact that typi-
cally the gradient in an image is sparse. In that setting one defines
a gradient operator Di j on each pixel and then solves the problem
q̂ = arg min ∑ kDi j qk2 subject to Aq = y.
i, j
This example fits into a broader class of CS approaches,
the analysis model, which seeks sparsity in the product of the
weighting coefficients with some analysis operator, whereas the
more common synthesis model seeks sparsity directly in the co-
efficient vector. As before, the analysis problem (3) can be mod-
ified to account for noise by relaxing the constraints as in the
synthesis case in (2).
3 Ultrasound sensing and CS
As discussed in Sec. 1, our goal is to create images (specif-
ically, occupancy grid style maps) of an environment from mea-
surements in the form of echoes, bouncing off nearby objects, of
an ultrasonic signal emitted by a robot. While eventually, it may
be possible to expand the reconstruction to include target char-
acteristics such as size, shape, orientation, reflectivity, etc., here
we focus purely on determining the object location.
A simplified motivating example to look at is the case of a
unit pulse radiated out into the environment which reflects off of
targets at known locations as shown in Figure 1a. In this sim-
ple setting, the pulse travels through the air, bounces off each
target and returns to the sensor as a time-delayed pulse. The de-
lay of each received pulse is simply dependent on the speed of
sound and twice the distance to the target, as sound must travel
to and back from the target. In terms of acoustic intensity decay,
sound is assumed to travel as a spherical wave with power obey-
ing the inverse-square law. That is, the intensity decreases with
the square of the distance (i.e. I ∝ 1/r2 ). Additionally, in prac-
tice the receiver will have frequency- and angle-dependent at-
tenuation characteristics. For the purposes of these simulations,
a simple linear relationship is taken for the beam pattern (the
attenuation profile as a function of angle with respect to the sen-
sor). Sound from directly in front of the sensor experiences no
attenuation, there is complete attenuation beyond the angle spec-
ifying the sensing cone, and the points inside the sensing cone
follow a linear interpolation between these extremes. The simu-
lated receiver is also assumed to be frequency invariant. Figure 2
shows the simulated pattern and an example experimental beam
pattern.
There are many other physical considerations in properly
modeling sound propagation, including floor and wall multi-path
Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use
(3)
(a) A single robot (b) Multiple robots/perspectives
FIGURE 1: Simple illustration of two sensing scenarios. (a) A
single robot with four objects; three objects are in the sensing
cone and will return echoes to the receiver. (b) Two robots look-
ing at the same scene from two vantages. Two of the objects are
seen by both, allowing the symmetry inherent in a single mea-
surement to be broken.
reflections, measurement noise, potential anisotropy of target re-
flection and absorption, the effects of shadowing (walls or other
objects in the foreground obscuring or completely shadowing
those in background), out-of-plane objects, and objects in motion
or the notion of a dynamically changing map. While it is likely
necessary to include at least some of these issues in practice, in
this section we focus on the core ideas and ignore these physical
complications. In Sec. 4 we will discuss the impact of at least
some of these considerations while others will be considered in
future work.
In our simplified setting, we assume we have a robot in a
sparse environment, that is one with only a small number of ob-
jects. In general the main tasks are to choose a sparsifying basis
Ψ and a measurement matrix Φ, but since the environment is it-
self sparse, Ψ can be taken to be an identity matrix. For more
complicated simulations and realistic environments, the addition
of an analysis operator (e.g. finding a sparse number of walls
using a difference operator, as in [22]) and/or the right sparsity
basis could better aid in capturing certain features or to more
sparsely capture the desired map image, though finding the right
combination of these is also left to future work.
To build the sensing matrix, we must discretize the space by
describing it using an occupancy grid and discretize the time sig-
nal by regularly sampling the waveform at the receiver. Note that
the received signal is the sum of each target’s reflected signal in
the sensing domain. The choices of discretization size in both
space and time are related to the achievable (or desired) resolu-
tion in the map. A signal that is sampled too slowly with respect
to the grid size or, equivalently, an overly fine grid, would lead to
a lack of sensitivity to occupancy in some of the cells. Similarly,
a sampling rate which is too fast (or grid size which is too large)
4 Copyright © 2018 ASME
 (a) Linear pattern with inset showing corresponding polar plot
(b) Experimentally determined beam pattern
FIGURE 2: Example beam patterns. (a) A linear beam pattern
with a sensing cone width of 80 degrees. (b) Experimental beam
pattern of Series 600 Instrument Grade sensor from SensComp
at 50kHz.
implies that there is more information in the signal than is being
taken advantage of in the mapping.
For each grid cell, an idealized object occupying it would
produce a time-delayed version of the input signal, which is also
attenuated by an amount that reflects the object’s distance from
(due to the 1/r2 law) and angle to (due to the angle dependence
of the receiver) the sensor. Sorting each of the cells in the sens-
ing cone by distance away from the sensor, and putting each
cell’s time-delayed reflected signal as a column vector into a sin-
gle matrix leads to our ultrasonic sensing observation matrix, the
columns of which serve as elements of a basis for expressing the
true received signal. Applying the `1 reconstruction algorithm in
(2) (or a greedy, approximating approach) will yield the spars-
est vector that best matches the observations. While there is no
guarantee of exact reconstruction (and, as discussed below, such
exactness is not expected), our results indicate reasonable results.
A specific example of a sensing matrix is shown in Figure 3.
Here the sensor axis is aligned with the y−axis of the map grid.
In interpreting the sensing matrix, it helps to think of the rows
as the time axis and the columns as the space axis, in terms of
distance out from the robot. The height of the A matrix is dic-
tated in part by the sampling rate, and its width is dictated in part
by the grid sizing, but both height and width are capped by the
notion that after enough time, the sound will decay so much that
it can be ignored. In essence, it’s not worth listening past some
point in time, and it’s not worth considering sound reflection past
5 Copyright © 2018 ASME
Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use
FIGURE 3: Log plot of observation matrix. Each column corre-
sponds to a grid cell in the cone. The inset illustrates the stepped
delays and the presence of identical columns.
objects at some cutoff distance. The organization of pixels by
distance from the sensor leads to the banded-like structure seen
in the figure. Note that there are many such observation matri-
ces, depending on the choice of emitted signal, sampling time,
grid spacing and other factors.
In this setting, it is immediately worth noting that if the sen-
sor’s beam pattern is symmetric, pulse delay timing and signal
attenuation are insufficient to distinguish between two targets
symmetrically located about the centerline in front of the re-
ceiver. This shows up in the sensing matrix by having two or
more columns that are the same as can be seen in the inset of
Figure 3. As a result, when the reconstruction algorithm selects
the optimal weighting coefficients, it may select either cell or
both. While this is at first problematic, it does help underscore
the usefulness of non-uniform beam patterns in discerning targets
directly in front of the robot from those nearer to the periphery,
and to orient the sensor obliquely to the grid to reduce or even
eliminate the number of cells that are equidistant from the sensor.
When there is redundancy, integer constraints can be imposed on
the coefficients to encourage the algorithm to only choose one of
the cells. Of course, this does not address the symmetry problem
and there is no guarantee that the correct cell will be selected,
only that a single cell will show up in the reconstruction.
An environment with only three objects is shown in the in-
set of Figure 4 together with the corresponding train of received
pulses. Each of the objects is inside the sensing cone, and so
three pulses are reflected, attenuated and received with different
 FIGURE 4: Received pulse train and occupancy grid of the work-
ing environment.
delays. A reconstruction from the received signal and the Φ ma-
trix was generated using the greedy algorithm Compressive Sam-
pling Matching Pursuit (CoSaMP) [36] implemented in Matlab.
It should be noted that in the absence of additional constraints
in the optimization problem, the reconstruction coefficients can
take on any real value. It is relatively straightforward to impose
additional constraints to ensure either non-negative, integer or
even binary coefficients. It is also important to note that the re-
construction considers each grid cell in its entirety; there is no
possibility of “partial” occupancy. However, by changing the
model and the corresponding Φ matrix, it should be possible to
encode additional information in the reconstruction, such as re-
flectivity or object size relative to the cell resolution.
In using CoSaMP, the user specifies the desired sparsity level
(that is, the number of coefficients which may be nonzero), the
vector of observations, and the combined A matrix. Outputs in-
clude the vector of optimizing coefficients, the residual, and its
norm. The residual is computed as the difference between the ob-
servations and the product of the selected coefficients with the A
matrix. Greedy algorithms such as CoSaMP reconstruct one co-
efficient at a time, selecting the one that minimizes the residual.
This coefficient is then removed from the reconstruction problem
and the process repeated.
In our working example, the reconstruction found by
CoSaMP is shown in Figure 5. In this figure, the three true targets
are shown as black dots and the reconstructed values are shown
in grayscale. For consistency across this work, all reconstruc-
tions use a 1m grid sizing and impose a sparsity level of 15 and
non-negativity constraints.
In this example, the sensor is aligned with the map grid and
as a result there is a symmetry about the centerline of the sensing
cone. Because the outgoing pulse and receiver characteristics are
6 Copyright © 2018 ASME
Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use
FIGURE 5: Map reconstruction using CoSaMP in motivating ex-
ample.
symmetric, the algorithm cannot distinguish between cells that
are equidistant. This shows up in the two closer objects; the re-
construction indicates that either of two cells is possible for each
target. There is, in fact, an entire family of equivalent solutions
where the weighting of the reconstruction is spread between all
the symmetric possibilities in any convex combination. In gen-
eral however, the sensor will not be aligned with the grid and
thus in practice very few cells will share an exact distance with
another.
There are various ways to resolve this symmetry issue. As
the goal is to generate a map of the entire environment, it is nat-
ural for the robot to move through the environment, collecting
information from multiple viewpoints as shown in Figure 1b,
and, possibly, to have multiple communicating robots working
together to generate a map. By combining overlapping measure-
ments, ambiguity due to symmetry can be resolved. Note that
under this approach, it is advantageous to have a reconstruction
that indicates all possible object locations rather than commit-
ting to any particular choice to avoid “false negatives”. This may
be particular beneficial when combined with a Bayesian environ-
ment model to account for noise in the measurements.
When looking at a single set of measurements, one straight-
forward way to break the symmetry is to use a pair of sensors
with different orientations. This would address the problem in
several ways. First, it would enable the use of two simultane-
ously emitted pulses of different lengths (or more complex sig-
nals in general) to propagate through the environment creating
a more unique signature for received signals. Second it would
mean that the set of two sensors would now be able to discern
right from left based on intensity differences (note that in a three-
dimensional setting, a third sensor would be required to break the
up-down symmetry). One could conceivably also use time delays
 FIGURE 6: A simple schematic showing two-ray path propa-
gation. The propagated and reflected signals traverse two paths
each, for a total of four paths over which they may lose power (a) Single path.
through reflection, scattering and atmospheric losses.

between detection at the two sensors to measure direction [37].

However, the distance between the sensors must be sufficiently
large relative to the sample rates to detect the time difference.
Using multiple sensors has multiple drawbacks, especially when
considering small, low-power robots. Beyond the fact that the
robot must carry additional payload, the use of additional sen-
sors increases the number of measurements to consider (as does
increasing the sample rate). This adds more rows to the Φ matrix
and drives up the computational complexity of the reconstruction
problem. Of course, the use of two (or more) sensors may aid in
performing cheap navigation based on echoic flow, and if map
reconstruction is to be done offline, concerns related to compu-
tational complexity become less important.
4 Bringing in some reality
In this section we address one of the biggest physical sim-
plifications up to this point, namely the (non-physical) assump-
tion that sound travels as an amplitude pulse, rather than a sig-
nal at a given frequency (or frequencies) propagating as a sound
wave. Treating the signal as one that has an amplitude and fre-
quency and including the effects of signal phase in the simula-
tions introduce significant complications. With multiple objects
located close enough to each other, their individual signal reflec-
tions would cause interference with one another at the receiver.
Not only that, for a robot traversing the ground, flying at a fixed
height or moving along and near enough to a wall, signal reflec-
tions bouncing off the surface travel a greater distance than that
of the signal reflected straight back to the robot, causing the sin-
gle object’s multi-path reflections to interfere with each other.
To keep the discussion focused, we consider only the case of in-
terference arising from ground reflections. There are four paths
involving one object and the floor, as shown in Figure 6: 1) direct
line-of-sight, 2) floor first then object, 3) object first then floor,
and 4) floor, then object, then floor again. Only three of these
(b) Multi-path.
FIGURE 7: Received pulse train (a) with single-path sinusoidal
pulses and (b) with multi-path sinusoidal pulses experiencing in-
terference.
paths have a unique distance and so a unique effect on Φ.
To deal with the effects of interference of the reception of
these signals from these paths, we take advantage of the fact that,
given we are receiving echoes from an object in a specific pixel,
the path lengths in Figure 6 are known and thus the details of the
received signal can be encoded into the structure of Φ. Figure
7 shows the received sets of sinusoidal pulses with and without
floor reflections in the same environment as before. An arbitrar-
ily chosen robot height of 1 m was used for the simulations. The
interference pattern is found by calculating each object’s multi-
ple path distances and summing the resulting set of sinusoids,
each of which is delayed in phase and contracted in amplitude
according to the corresponding path length. This pattern is then
sampled at a predetermined rate.
Figure 8 shows the results of a simulation with the floor ef-
fects in place, comparing the reconstruction results using a sim-
ple measurement matrix (accounting for only the sinusoidal na-
ture of the signal) and one that addresses floor reflections. Figure

7 Copyright © 2018 ASME

Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use

 (a) Ground truth map (b) Reconstructed map with simple Φ (c) Reconstructed map with multi-path Φ

(d) Received signal (e) Error with simple Φ (f) Error with milti-path Φ

FIGURE 8: Results with wave-based pulse and floor reflections. (a) True environment and (d) actual received signal. (b) Environment
reconstruction and (e) the error between the true and reconstructed signal pulse (i.e. y − Φq) if floor reflections are not accounted for.
Notice the many spurious object positions in the reconstruction and the distinct lack of coefficients which acknowledge the near and far
objects. (c) Environment reconstruction and (f) the error if floor reflections are accounted for. Notice the accuracy of the environment
reconstruction is again limited primarily by symmetry. The non-zero error reflects the difference between the grid locations (as captured
in Φ and the actual object positions.

8a is the true environment and Figure 8d is the measured signal
used in the subsequent reconstruction. Note that this is the same
environment as is used in Figure 7b. Figure 8b is the recon-
struction using the single path model. The residual error signal,
calculated as rerr = y − Aq, is shown in Figure 8e. Finally, Fig-
ure 8c is the reconstruction and Figure 8f is corresponding error
signal using the multi-path model. Because of the strong de-
structive interference patterns that exist in the near and far object
pulses, the simple sinusoidal basis elements of the single-path
measurement matrix are not suited to representing an object in
the neighborhood of each target while also driving the residual
error down. This is obvious in the case of the far object for which
the pulse has two large spikes but a small average amplitude, and
the reconstruction algorithm prioritizes the residual error caused
by the larger amplitude pulse from the middle object. Though
it may be hard to see in the multi-path reconstruction map, each
reconstruction uses the maximum allowable number of nonzero
coefficients.
Adding object-ground interference to the observation matrix
is simple enough, but in doing so there is still some assumption
about the relative strength of signals coming from the ground re-
flections to those from the object itself. The major factors here
are the ground and object surface and angle-dependent reflection
properties. Clearly carpet and concrete floors would generate no-
ticeably different reflections and therefore different Φ matrices.
Note that this same essential description holds even in more
complex environments composed of many walls (like an office
space) or objects. However, the number of angles at which sound
can bounce off various surfaces before reaching the robot in-
creases dramatically, complicating the analysis presented above.
The possibility of unknown multi-path modes of interference
make the construction of a physically representative Φ matrix
much more difficult. However, as long as multi-path or other
phenomena can be modeled, they can be incorporated into the
observation matrix. It is also important to note that because the
time duration of the signal is short interference is only an issue

8 Copyright © 2018 ASME

Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use

 from objects that are close relative to the pulse length.
Ideally, for including arbitrary wall- or object-based multi-
path effects, there would be a closed-loop approach to the con-
struction of the Φ matrix, and the best approach to including
these physical scenarios is not immediately clear. As a first ex-
tension from ground reflections, an echoic-flow based corridor-
or wall-following navigation scheme could aim to put a long
wall(s) at a fixed distance from the robot. In this case, if the
robot is able to maintain a fixed distance accurately, there would
be additional predictable surfaces (the floor and some number of
walls) whose multi-path effects could be added to the Φ matrix
in pseudo-open loop. Iterative CS which performs successive re-
constructions from one set of data, CS-based SLAM which uses
a history of measurements to guide the current reconstruction and
the experimental testing and application of each of these increas-
ingly involved approaches are left to future work.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we have presented an approach to using in-air
ultrasonic measurements combined with compressive sensing-
based reconstruction to build local maps. We initially began
with a simple setting, focusing on a square pulse emitted into
the environment, to illustrate the method and the construction of
the measurement matrix and then moved to a more realistic and
complex scenario. Simulation results indicate the technique can
recover more than just the distance to the closest object and pro-
duce a map of the objects in the sensor range. We then show that
compressive sensing, rather than just looking for clear, separated
echoes in the received signal, allows us to handle returns that
have complicated structure arising from multi-path and interfer-
ence effects that make direct interpretation of the received signal
challenging.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by NSF through CMMI-
1562031 and ECCS-1509084.
REFERENCES
[1] Thrun, S., 2003. “Robotic Mapping: A survey”. In Explor-
ing Artificial Intelligence in the New Millennium, G. Lake-
meyer and B. Nebel, eds. pp. 1–34.
[2] Cadena, C., Carlone, L., Carrillo, H., Latif, Y., Scaramuzza,
D., Neira, J., Reid, I., and Leonard, J. J., 2016. “Past,
Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization and Map-
ping: Toward the Robust-Perception Age”. IEEE Transac-
tions on Robotics, 32(6), pp. 1309–1332.
[3] Wood, R., Nagpal, R., and Wei, G.-Y., 2013. “Flight of the
Robobees”. Scientific American, 308(3), Feb., pp. 60–65.
9 Copyright © 2018 ASME
Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use
[4] Scaramuzza, D., Achtelik, M. C., Doitsidis, L., Friedrich,
F., Kosmatopoulos, E., Martinelli, A., Achtelik, M. W.,
Chli, M., Chatzichristofis, S., Kneip, L., Gurdan, D., Heng,
L., Lee, G. H., Lynen, S., Pollefeys, M., Renzaglia, A.,
Siegwart, R., Stumpf, J. C., Tanskanen, P., Troiani, C.,
Weiss, S., and Meier, L., 2014. “Vision-Controlled Micro
Flying Robots: From System Design to Autonomous Navi-
gation and Mapping in GPS-Denied Environments”. IEEE
Robotics and Automation Magazine, 21(3), pp. 26–40.
[5] Colorado, J., Rossi, C., Zhang, C., and Barrientos, A.,
2015. “Towards efficient flight: insights on proper
morphing-wing modulation in a bat-like robot”. Advanced
Robotics, 29(24), Oct., pp. 1599–1610.
[6] Zou, Y., Zhang, W., Zhou, S., Ke, X., Cui, F., and Liu, W.,
2018. “Monolithic fabrication of an insect-scale self-lifting
flapping-wing robot”. Micro & Nano Letters, 13(2), Feb.,
pp. 267–269.
[7] Schaub, A., Baumgartner, D., and Burschka, D., 2017. “Re-
active Obstacle Avoidance for Highly Maneuverable Vehi-
cles Based on a Two-Stage Optical Flow Clustering”. IEEE
Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 18(8),
pp. 2137–2152.
[8] AlSaif, S. A., Smith, G. E., and Baker, C. J., 2016. “Echoic
flow for target following and approach”. In 2016 CIE Inter-
national Conference on Radar (RADAR), IEEE, pp. 1–5.
[9] Lambrinos, D., Moeller, R., Labhart, T., Pfeifer, R., and
Wehner, R., 2000. “A mobile robot employing insect strate-
gies for navigation”. Robotics and Autonomous Systems,
30(1-2), Jan., pp. 39–64.
[10] Jung, S., Kim, J., and Kim, S., 2009. “Simultaneous lo-
calization and mapping of a wheel-based autonomous ve-
hicle with ultrasonic sensors”. Artificial Life and Robotics,
14(2), p. 186.
[11] Quistgaard, J. U., 1997. “Signal acquisition and processing
in medical diagnostic ultrasound”. IEEE Signal Processing
Magazine, 14(1), pp. 67–74.
[12] Rosenblum, L. D., Gordon, M. S., and Jarquin, L., 2010.
“Echolocating Distance by Moving and Stationary Listen-
ers”. Ecological Psychology, 12(3), June, pp. 181–206.
[13] Dokmanic, I., Parhizkar, R., Walther, A., Lu, Y. M., and
Vetterli, M., 2013. “Acoustic echoes reveal room shape”.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(30),
July, pp. 12186–12191.
[14] Krekovic, M., Dokmanic, I., and Vetterli, M., 2016.
“EchoSLAM: Simultaneous localization and mapping with
acoustic echoes”. In IEEE International Conference on
Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), IEEE,
pp. 11–15.
[15] Elfes, A., 1989. “Using occupancy grids for mobile robot
perception and navigation”. Computer, 22(6), pp. 46–57.
[16] Wolf, D. F., and Sukhatme, G. S., 2008. “Semantic
Mapping Using Mobile Robots”. IEEE Transactions on
 Robotics, 24(2), pp. 245–258.
[17] Kuipers, B., Modayil, J., Beeson, P., MacMahon, M., and
Savelli, F., 2004. “Local metrical and global topological
maps in the hybrid spatial semantic hierarchy”. In IEEE In-
ternational Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004.
Proceedings. ICRA ’04. 2004, IEEE, pp. 4845–4851 Vol.5.
[18] Candès, E. J., and Wakin, M. B., 2008. “An Introduction
To Compressive Sampling”. IEEE Signal Processing Mag-
azine, 25(2), pp. 21–30.
[19] Andersson, S. B., and Pao, L. Y., 2012. “Non-Raster Sam-
pling in Atomic Force Microscopy: A Compressed Sensing
Approach”. In American Control Conference, pp. 2485–
2490.
[20] Luo, Y., and Andersson, S. B., 2015. “A Fast Image
Reconstruction Algorithm for Compressed Sensing-Based
Atomic Force Microscopy”. In American Control Confer-
ence, pp. 1–6.
[21] Luo, Y., and Andersson, S. B., 2015. “A comparison
of reconstruction methods for undersampled atomic force
microscopy images”. Nanotechnology, 26(50), Dec.,
p. 505703.
[22] Ma, F., Carlone, L., Ayaz, U., and Karaman, S., 2016.
“Sparse sensing for resource-constrained depth reconstruc-
tion”. In 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on In-
telligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE, pp. 96–103.
[23] Qin, S., Zhang, Y. D., Wu, Q., and Amin, M. G.,
2014. “Large-scale sparse reconstruction through parti-
tioned compressive sensing”. In 2014 19th International
Conference on Digital Signal Processing, pp. 837–840.
[24] Boufounos, P., and Asif, M. S., 2010. “Compressive sam-
pling for streaming signals with sparse frequency content”.
In 2010 44th Annual Conference on Information Sciences
and Systems (CISS), pp. 1–6.
[25] Candès, E. J., 2006. “Compressive sampling”. In Interna-
tional Congress of Mathematicians.
[26] Baraniuk, R. G., 2007. “Compressive Sensing [Lec-
ture Notes]”. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 24(4),
pp. 118–121.
10
Downloaded From: https://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org on 11/18/2018 Terms of Use: http://www.asme.org/about-asme/terms-of-use
[27] Davenport, M. A., Massimino, A. K., Needell, D., and
Woolf, T. “Constrained Adaptive Sensing”. IEEE Trans-
actions on Signal Processing, 64(20), pp. 5437–5449.
[28] Nam, S., Davies, M. E., Elad, M., and Gribonval, R., 2013.
“The cosparse analysis model and algorithms”. Applied and
Computational Harmonic Analysis, 34(1), Jan., pp. 30–56.
[29] Zhang, Z., Xu, Y., Yang, J., Li, X., and Zhang, D., 2015.
“A survey of sparse representation: Algorithms and appli-
cations”. IEEE Access, 3, pp. 490–530.
[30] Donoho, D. L., Vetterli, M., DeVore, R. A., and
Daubechies, I., 1998. “Data Compression and Harmonic
Analysis”. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory,
44(6), Oct., pp. 2435–2476.
[31] DeVore, R. A., 1998. “Nonlinear approximation”. Acta
Numerica, 7, Jan., pp. 51–150.
[32] Candès, E. J., Romberg, J., and Tao, T., 2006. “Robust
uncertainty principles: exact signal reconstruction from
highly incomplete frequency information”. IEEE Transac-
tions on Information Theory, 52(2), Feb., pp. 489–509.
[33] Baraniuk, R. G., Davenport, M., DeVore, R., and Wakin,
M., 2008. “A Simple Proof of the Restricted Isometry Prop-
erty for Random Matrices”. Constructive Approximation,
28(3), Jan., pp. 253–263.
[34] Haupt, J., Castro, R. M., and Nowak, R., 2011. “Distilled
Sensing: Adaptive Sampling for Sparse Detection and Esti-
mation”. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 57(9),
Sept., pp. 6222–6235.
[35] Luo, Y., and Andersson, S. B., 2017. “A sampling pattern
design algorithm for atomic force microscopy images”. In
IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.
[36] Needell, D., and Tropp, J. A., 2009. “CoSaMP: Iterative
signal recovery from incomplete and inaccurate samples”.
Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, 26(3),
pp. 301–321.
[37] Andersson, S. B., Handzel, A. A., Shah, V., and Krish-
naprasad, P. S., 2004. “Robot phonotaxis with dynamic
sound-source localization”. In IEEE International Confer-
ence on Robotics and Automation, IEEE, pp. 3849–3854.
Copyright © 2018 ASME