Robot audition: Its rise and perspectives

The ability of robots to listen to several things at once with their own “ears”, that is, robot audition, is an important factor in improving interaction and symbiosis between humans and robots. The critical issue in robot audition is real-time processing and robustness against noisy environments with high flexibility to support various kinds of robots and hardware configurations. This paper first overviews activities and issues related to robot audition. Then, it presents the “HARK” robot audition software, which provides three primary functions for robot audition, sound source localization, sound source separation, and separated sound recognition, and then reports their performance. Finally, it discusses future directions in new promising areas as well as robotics.