.. _sonar:

Sonar
=====

General Description
-------------------
Sonar stands for SOund Navigation And Ranging and as a technique it is
used for navigation, communication or detection of vehicles. It can be
divided into two subclasses, active and passive. With active sonar
pulses of sound are emitted and bounced back by objects which can be
heared. Passive sonar only uses listening to sounds made by vessels to
detect them. The SEGA robot only uses the active version.

Technical Description
---------------------
The sonar consists of a transmitter and a receiver, which can be the
same unit, two units or more different units. These are respectively
monstatic, bistatic and multistatic operation. Sonar uses a pulse of
sound, also called a 'ping', which can then be heared as reflections,
also called an 'echo'. With this echo you can calculate the distance it
has travelled by using the time it took between the sending of the pulse
and the receiving of the reflexion and the speed of sound. With this
distance you can estimate you position relative to other objects, what
is what we want.

.. automodule:: sonar
    :members: