Active audition system and humanoid exterior design

In this paper, we present that a humanoid active audition system improved noise cancellation using humanoid cover acoustics and the cover design for an industrial exterior design. From the viewpoint of a design, the cover of humanoid should be functional and beautiful. And, the humanoid exterior should not obstruct the motion of the humanoid. In other words, a humanoid with motion requires design for motion. This is an important issue in the robotics field because exterior design of robots has not been sufficiently studied yet. As for active audition, it is an important problem to distinguish between the internal sounds like motor noises and sounds which originate from the outer world. It is important that inevitable motor noise is cancelled while the humanoid is in motion. Therefore, humanoids require the exterior to cancel such internal noises because it separates humanoid inner world from the outer world. We reported an active audition system focused on the sound source tracking by integrating audition, vision and motor movements using sound separation of the humanoid cover. The experiments show that the humanoid can track and localize sound sources more accurately, however noise cannot always cancelled out optimally and further improvements are required.