Title :
Sounds Good: Simulation and Evaluation of Audio Communication for Multi-Robot Exploration
Author :
Karimian, Pooya ; Vaughan, Richard ; Brown, Sarah
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Comput. Sci., Simon Fraser Univ., Burnaby, BC
Abstract :
In order to guide the design of a new multi-robot system, we seek to evaluate two different designs of audio direction sensor. We have implemented a simple but useful audio propagation simulator as an extension to the stage multi-robot simulator. We use the simulator to evaluate the use of audio signals to improve the performance of a team of robots at a prototypical search task. The results indicate that, for this task, (i) audio can significantly improve team performance, and (ii) binary discrimination of the direction of a sound source (left/right) performs no worse than high-resolution direction information. This result suggests that a simple two-microphone audio system would be useful for our real robots, without advanced signal processing to find sound direction
Keywords :
audio signals; microphones; mobile robots; multi-robot systems; path planning; audio communication; audio direction sensor; audio propagation simulator; multi-robot exploration; two-microphone audio system; Acoustic sensors; Animals; Computational modeling; Humans; Microphones; Multirobot systems; Orbital robotics; Robot sensing systems; Robot vision systems; Sensor systems;
Conference_Titel :
Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Beijing
Print_ISBN :
1-4244-0258-1
Electronic_ISBN :
1-4244-0259-X
DOI :
10.1109/IROS.2006.281995