Estimating speaker direction on a humanoid robot with binaural acoustic signals.

Journal: PloS one
PMID:

Abstract

To achieve human-like behaviour during speech interactions, it is necessary for a humanoid robot to estimate the location of a human talker. Here, we present a method to optimize the parameters used for the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation, while also considering real-time applications for human-robot interaction scenarios. This method is applied to binaural sound source localization framework on a humanoid robotic head. Real data is collected and annotated for this work. Optimizations are performed via a brute force method and a Bayesian model based method, results are validated and discussed, and effects on latency for real-time use are also explored.

Authors

  • Pranav Barot
    Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
  • Katja Mombaur
    Ruprecht-Karls-Universität.
  • Ewen N MacDonald
    Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.