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Embodied Audition for RobotS

Embodied Audition for RobotS

Objective

The success of future natural intuitive human-robot interaction (HRI) will critically depend on how responsive the robot will be to all forms of human expressions and how well it will be aware of its environment. With acoustic signals distinctively characterizing physical environments and speech being the most effective means of communication among humans, truly humanoid robots must be able to fully extract the rich auditory information from their environment and to use voice communication as much as humans do. While vision-based HRI is well developed, current limitations in robot audition do not allow for such an effective, natural acoustic human-robot communication in real-world environments, mainly because of the severe degradation of the desired acoustic signals due to noise, interference and reverberation when captured by the robot's microphones. To overcome these limitations, EARS will provide intelligent 'ears' with close-to-human auditory capabilities and use it for HRI in complex real-world environments. Novel microphone arrays and powerful signal processing algorithms shall be able to localise and track multiple sound sources of interest and to extract and recognize the desired signals. After fusion with robot vision, embodied robot cognition will then derive HRI actions and knowledge on the entire scenario, and feed this back to the acoustic interface for further auditory scene analysis. As a prototypical application, EARS will consider a welcoming robot in a hotel lobby offering all the above challenges. Representing a large class of generic applications, this scenario is of key interest to industry and, thus, a leading European robot manufacturer will integrate EARS's results into a robot platform for the consumer market and validate it. In addition, the provision of open-source software and an advisory board with key players from the relevant robot industry should help to make EARS a turnkey project for promoting audition in the robotics world.

Programme(s)

FP7-ICT - Specific Programme "Cooperation": Information and communication technologies

Topic(s)

ICT-2013.2.1 - Robotics, Cognitive Systems & Smart Spaces, Symbiotic Interaction

Call for proposal

FP7-ICT-2013-10

See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

CP - Collaborative project (generic)
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Coordinator

FRIEDRICH-ALEXANDER-UNIVERSITAET ERLANGEN NUERNBERG

Address

Schlossplatz 4
91054 Erlangen

Germany

Activity type

Higher or Secondary Education Establishments

EU Contribution

€ 799 545

Website

Contact the organisation

Administrative Contact

Franziska Müller (Ms.)

Participants (5)

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HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITAET ZU BERLIN

Germany

EU Contribution

€ 505 980

INSTITUT NATIONAL DE RECHERCHE ENINFORMATIQUE ET AUTOMATIQUE

France

EU Contribution

€ 474 944

SOFTBANK ROBOTICS EUROPE

France

EU Contribution

€ 724 192

BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV

Israel

EU Contribution

€ 480 593

IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE

United Kingdom

EU Contribution

€ 534 727

Project information

Grant agreement ID: 609465

Status

Closed project

  • Start date

    1 January 2014

  • End date

    31 December 2016

Funded under:

FP7-ICT

  • Overall budget:

    € 4 631 728

  • EU contribution

    € 3 519 981

Coordinated by:

FRIEDRICH-ALEXANDER-UNIVERSITAET ERLANGEN NUERNBERG

Germany

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Last update: 25 April 2017

Record number: 110771