Reliable Detection of Sound’s Direction for Active Audition

In this paper, we propose reliable detection of sound’s direction for human robot interaction. Compared with previous researches, this system comprises simpler algorithm and a proposed nonlinear amplifier which has advantages to increase a detectible distance of sound signal in spite of simple circuits. Moreover, we propose the new performance index using cross-correlation to make reliable detection of sound’s direction. Also, since this system include a function to detect a period of voice signals, the robot can know when to start finding sound’s direction and performing speech recognition automatically. In order to verify our system's performances, we install the proposed audition system to the prototype robot, called IROBAA (Intelligent ROBot for Active Audition), and describe the experimental results.