An open platform of auditory perception for home service robots

Abstract

This paper proposes and implements an auditory perception platform for a home service robot that serves the elderly living alone at home. A layered architecture for the proposed platform was developed to realize the various auditory perception capabilities while enabling a remote caregiver to involve in the sound event recognition process. We successfully implemented the software for this architecture that realizes robot services and auditory services for developing high level auditory applications. The robot is able to estimate the sound source position and recognize human speech in the room with multiple sound sources, as well as to collaborate with the caregiver on sound event recognition. Our experimental results validated the proposed platform.