PING detecting position

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

So I was doing some preliminary planning for this project and I was hoping to get some insight. basically instead of just simply calculating distance with the ping I want to calculate the exact position of the object relative to the sensor. basically my plan is this the PING sensor will be mounted on a servo that can move. I will have 4 quadrants of detection with quadrant 1 starting from the left.

basically to pinpoint this object I want to use a while loop

while(ObjectDetectQuad1==True)
{

//Move the Servo 1degree till its no longer true
Degrees++;

}

therefore I will have a relative approximation of the angle at which the object is. So I can use the cosine and sine functions to calculate the X and Y distance. XDist= TotDistCOS(degrees) YDist= TotDistSin(degrees). Another dilemma though Im just unsure of where I would put this calculation since I want to calculate it when its just out of ObjectDetectQuad1.

Ping example distance calc.jpg
Ping example distance calc.jpg1008×630 15.6 KB

2

I can see three potential problems with this approach. First, your typical servo is not going to be very precise or repeatable for angles down to the 1 degree level. Second, the detection shape for these sonar sensors are not the straight cones your sketch implies. And third the size/shape of the object impact how well/where the object will no longer be detected on the edges...

The project is worth exploring, but needs experimentation and testing to determine how useful it would be.

3