Goodears: robot orientado por um farol acústico

Abstract

This paper presents a brief description of the Goodears robot which is an autonomous robot capable of following an acoustic source. The robot has two microphones spaced by a given distance DM. The direction of the sound source is computed based on the delay between the microphone signals. Two distinct approaches have been followed concerning the acoustic source: previously known and unknown. In the first case, a pair of matched filters wasused, combined with one PLL each, resulting in a very goodperformance. The robot could effectively follow a soundsource with pre-determined characteristics even when emitting with low power and in the presence of noise. In the second case a cross correlation was carried out between the signals of the two microphones. The results were positivealthough not as good as those of the first approach.