Simultaneous IR Object Detection and IR Control?

It sounds like the distance detector is a canned solution that you
can't change, which may limit your ability to solve problems.

One thing you could do is simply sanity filter the output - if the
distance reading jumps, take another.  Don't believe anything that
doesn't read the same (+/- error) twice.  Harder if you have it
spinning to scan the room...

If you were designing both IR systems from scratch, using different
modulation frequencies would help.  It's possible they are already
different - have you tried and verified a problem?  When the IR
transmitter and receiver are adjacent, it's easy to use synchronous
detection (turn on the source, read, turn off the source, read,
subtract) to get noise immunity - the module may already do that.  When
the source is something else, you are limited to filtering based on
frequency (or much more complicated, pseudorandom code) and checking
the data for validity with a checksum, etc.

Would polarizing filters work with IR?

Have you tested to verify there's actuall a problem?

This shouldn't cause much of a problem -- The Sharp detectors use a
modulated signal of ab0ut 1 khz with a 10% duty cycle. The remote
control detector/demodulators use a signal of around 38-42 khz. In
general, this won't cause a problem -- one of my robots uses the sharp
detectors as auxiliary obstacle detectors and can also be controlled via
  VCR remotes -- I've not noticed any issues in practice.

Hope that helps -- tAfkaks

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