Aural servo : towards an alternative approach to sound localization for robot motion control

Abstract

This thesis is concerned about the development of a control framework based on auditory perception. In general, in robot audition, the motion control of a robot using hearing sense is based on sound source localization approaches. However, sound source localization under realistic conditions is a significant challenge to solve. In indoor environment perturbations caused by noise, reverberation or even the structure of the robot may alter the localization process. When considering dynamic scenes where the robot and/or the sound source might move, the degree of complexity of source localization raises to a higher level. As a result, sound source localization considering binaural setup is not achievable yet in real-world environments. By contrast, we develop in this thesis a sensor-based control approach, aural servo, that does not require to localize the source. The motion of the robot is straightly connected to the auditory perception: a positioning task is performed through a feedback loop where the motion of the robot is governed by the dynamic of low-level auditory features. Experimental results in various acoustic conditions and robotic platforms confirm the relevance of this approach for real-world environments.