Auditory system in a personal robot, PaPeRo

This paper presents implementation and evaluation of the auditory system in a personal robot, PaPeRo. The system consists of direction of arrival estimation, noise cancellation, and echo cancellation. It is implemented on PaPeRo which is operated by Windows XP on a Mobile Pentium 4-M 1.6 GHz chip. Evaluation results with recorded signals in the real environment demonstrates 40% higher source-localization accuracy as well as 65% and 71% higher speech recognition rates in noisy environment and during robot utterances. PaPeRo with this noise canceller is on exhibition at the 2005 World Exposition (EXPO 2005), Aichi, Japan.