Robot with fine hearing from Honda. Free Technical Library News

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Honda hearing robot

05.12.2012

Engineers at the Honda Research Institute rightly reasoned that a modern robot's keen hearing is as necessary as cameras, that is, vision. Deciding to focus on this aspect, the authors of the project built the HEARBO robot, which has a delicate hearing, it perceives sound from four sources at the same time and can point to each of them.

He received this skill thanks to the HARK system. Eight microphones are built into the head of the HEARBO (HEARing robot, which can be translated as "hearing robot"), the data from them is carefully processed. The system filters the sound coming from the 17 HEARBO motors, a step the developers call "self-noise suppression". Then the remaining components of the sound stream are analyzed, the direction to each of the sources is calculated, while the declared accuracy of the calculations is only one degree.

The ability to calculate the source of the sound will help the robot communicate with several people at the same time, which was confirmed in tests. Simulating work in a catering establishment, the robot took four orders from people who spoke at the same time. Similarly, the machine played "rock, paper, scissors", three players simultaneously called their move, and HEARBO determined the winner. In the future, he will be able to make out the speech of one person who addresses him in a noisy crowd. For the robot of the future, this is important.

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