Search and track power charge docking station based on sound source for autonomous mobile robot applications

The objectives of this paper is to develop a system for an autonomous mobile robot for searching and tracking sound source based target. The target can be a power charge docking station. Finding objects or events by following a sound source direction is an intuitive response for human and animal when they cannot see the target. However, there are relative fewer discussions about sound source tracking in robotics field. We design a navigation algorithm integrated with time delay of arrival (TDOA) techniques based on cross-correlation. To confirm the practicality of our approach, we design a robot docking scenario and develop an autonomous mobile robot with two microphone pairs, a camera and a laser range finder to conduct the experiments. According to the experimental results, our approach reduces the complex localization problems to save computing power, and have an acceptable result in an indoor environment.