Abstract
This paper proposes a method to make a mobile robot with auditory sensors (microphones) sense humans in an occluded area where visual sensors don't work well. Conventional mobile robots mainly use visual sensors such as monocular camera, stereo camera, and omni-directional camera, or laser range finders in recent years to recognize surrounding objects and humans. These sensors use visible or infrared light, thus when there is an object which obstruct the light, they cannot recognize humans behind the obstacle. To solve this problem, this paper utilizes auditory information to sense humans in occluded areas where the visual sensors can't get information. Even if some objects or walls obstruct the view, a robot can hear reflected or diffracted sounds. The proposed method is examined in several types of occluded environments. Experimental results show that the proposed method can recognize humans in occluded area and can avoid the unexpected collision with them.
