A Robot Can Map A Room Using Only AI And Sounds

Aadhya Khatri - Jul 21, 2019


A Robot Can Map A Room Using Only AI And Sounds

You may think that a robot must have the sense of sight to navigate around a room. However, that is not necessarily the case

You may think that a robot must possess the sense of sight to navigate around a room without continually bumping into walls or other obstacles. However, according to the experts from the University of Technology Sydney, that is not necessarily the case. They equipped a robot with a speaker, a microphone, and then tasked it with following a pre-planned path.

University-Of-Technology-Sydney-robot-sound
The experts come from University of Technology Sydney

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According to the researchers, a room’s shape can be determined from RIR (short for room impulse responses), which can be gathered from sound signals. The robot will take TOAs (time of arrivals) into consideration. If the TOAs are known, the distance between a location to the microphone can be calculated.

However, since the acoustic sensors follow an arbitrary order when recording echoes and reflections, as well as the fact that the distances are unlabeled, measuring TOAs is far from enough.

What the researchers did was to make use of a four-microphone array with the fourth one for distance verification, and a reflective point, which is the intersection of a possible wall line and a line from the microphone and a target spot.

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If the above point and the source of sounds are on two different sides of a potential wall line, the target spot will be considered noise.

After a series of tests, the researchers reported that the robot found the right rectangular room shape with a success rate of 100%.

Screenshot 39

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