Sounds Good: Simulation and Evaluation of Audio Communication for Multi-Robot Exploration

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