Popeye Audio Visual Robot
November 5th, 2009
A team from Perception On Purpose (POP) has come up with a technology that could speed up robotic understanding and responses to human behavior, and even conversations. One of the challenges that they encountered was attempting to integrate the different sensory models of sound and vision, but once they overcame that, the 2 senses helped overcome the limitations of both.
Vision allows the observer to infer certain properties, like size, shape, density and texture. Sound is used to locate the direction of the source, and identify what type of sound it is. On its own, a sound source is difficult to pinpoint because it needs to be located in a 3D space, and there is also the problem of background noise. By combining visual and auditory data the researchers found it easier for a robot to decide what is foreground and what is background.
