First applications of sound-based control on a mobile robot equipped with two microphones

Abstract

This paper validates experimentally a novel approach to robot audition, sound-based control, which consists in introducing auditory features directly as inputs of a closed-loop control scheme, that is, without any explicit localization process. The applications we present rely on the implicit bearings of the sound sources computed from the time difference of arrival (TDOA) between two microphones. By linking the motion of the robot to the aural perception of the environment, this approach has the benefit of being more robust to reverberation and noise. Therefore neither complex tracking method such as Kalman filtering nor TDOA enhancement with denoising or dereverberation methods are needed to track the correct TDOA measurements. The experiments conducted on a mobile robot instrumented with a pair of microphones show the validity of our approach. In a reverberating and noisy room, this approach is able to orient the robot to a mobile sound source in real time. A positioning task with respect to two sound sources is also performed while the robot perception is disturbed by altered and spurious TDOA measurements.

Sensor-Based Control for Collaborative Robots: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Opportunities

“…In total, we refer to the 45 papers revised above. These include the works with only one sensor, discussed in section 3 (Maeda et al, 2001 ; Kumon et al, 2003 , 2005 ; De Santis et al, 2007 ; Dune et al, 2008 ; Suphi Erden and Tomiyama, 2010 ; Suphi Erden and Maric, 2011 ; Tsui et al, 2011 ; Bussy et al, 2012 ; Flacco et al, 2012 ; Youssef et al, 2012 ; Ficuciello et al, 2013 ; Schlegl et al, 2013 ; Agustinos et al, 2014 ; Baumeyer et al, 2015 ; Gridseth et al, 2015 , 2016 ; Magassouba et al, 2015 , 2016a , b , c ; Wang et al, 2015 ; Bauzano et al, 2016 ; Cai et al, 2016 ; Leboutet et al, 2016 ; Narayanan et al, 2016 ; Bergner et al, 2017 ; Cortesao and Dominici, 2017 ; Dean-Leon et al, 2017 ) and those which integrated multiple sensors, discussed in section 4 (Huang et al, 1999 ; Okuno et al, 2001 , 2004 ; Natale et al, 2002 ; Hornstein et al, 2006 ; Pomares et al, 2011 ; Chan et al, 2012 ; Cherubini and Chaumette, 2013 ; Cherubini et al, 2014 , 2015 , 2016 ; Navarro et al, 2014 ; Papageorgiou et al, 2014 ; Dean-Leon et al, 2016 ; Chatelain et al, 2017 ). The five criteria are: sensor(s), integration method (when multiple sensors are used), control objective, target sector, and robot platform.…”

“…While the methods above only control the angular velocity of the rig ( ), Magassouba extended both to also regulate 2D translations of a mobile platform (ITD in Magassouba et al, 2015 , 2016c and ILD in Magassouba et al, 2016a ).…”

“…Audio-based control is currently (in our opinion) an underdeveloped research area with great potential for human-robot collaboration, e.g., for tracking a speaker. Besides the cited works (Magassouba et al, 2015 , 2016a , b , c ), that closely followed the framework of section 3, others have formulated the problem differently. For example, the authors of Kumon et al ( 2003 , 2005 ) proposed a linear model to describe the relation between the pan motion of a robot head and the difference of intensity between its two microphones.…”