Development of an Open-Source Object Flight Speed Measuring Setup for Indoor Measurements

Abstract

Time of flight measurement is an important procedure for indoor object flight speed measurement applications. Measuring a fast-moving object is very difficult such as military and sport shooting. Today, there is a requirement for measuring high-speed objects using a cost-effective solution. The speed detection processing requires two referencing points from flight start to end. The difference between these two points and time parameters leads to calculating speed. In-flight speed detection applications mostly an object is thrown by a launcher and measurements are conducted in a linear horizontal measurement line. The terminals of this line are referred to these two points. There are light-based solutions such as infra-red (IR) sensors, fast cameras for indoor speed measurement. However, commercial solutions based on sensors or fast cameras are expensive options and these solutions are not easily affordable for research facilities and laboratories with low-budget. In this study, an object flight speed detection setup is demonstrated for indoor measurements. The accuracy of the demonstrated setup was found 94%. The results show that is possible to use a microcontroller (MCU) with two IR sensor for calculating the flight speed with low-cost and high accuracy.