Design and Calibration of Large Microphone Arrays for Robotic Applications

Abstract

Hearing is amongst the most important senses a modern robot must exhibit. Perceiving the acoustic world enables capabilities such as natural interaction with humans, interpreting spoken commands or the localization of victims during search and rescue tasks. Real-world robotic operations often take place in noisy, reverberant environments while requiring features such as source separation, accurate direction of arrival estimation or high performance noise suppression. This work presents a methodology to design, calibrate and operate large microphone arrays that enable such features.