Realtime speaker tracking for robotic auditory system

Voice and sounds are the primary media employed for the human communication. Human is able to exchange information smoothly using voice under different situations such as noisy environment in a crowd and with the existence of plural speakers. We are surrounded by various sounds, and are able to detect the position of a source sound in 3D space, extract a particular sound from mixed sounds, and recognize what makes the sounds. The paper will introduce a realtime detection and identification of particular sound among plural sound sources using a microphone array based on the location of a speaker and the tonal characteristics. The algorithm is applied to an adaptive auditory system of a robotic arm for the interaction with humans.