Abstract
“Embodiment” plays a critical role in robots' learning, human-robot interaction, and understanding of environment for robots. The concept is also important for the research of robot audition and human auditory perception. We devised an acoustical telepresence robot, “TeleHead” that has a user-like dummy head and can be synchronized with user's head movement. We performed several psychophysical experiments to assess sound localization, delay discrimination, and auditory perceptual grouping ability in humans. The errors of the sound localization via TeleHead were less than 10[deg]. Head posture change during the discriminable delay time ranged from 10[deg] to 17[deg]. The performance of auditory perceptual grouping did not differ between conditions with and without TeleHead. In addition, we used TeleHead to divide head movement effects on perception into three factors: self-movement, sound source movement, and acoustical change. The results indicate that TeleHead can mirror the 3D motion of users with minimal latency and distortion, suggesting that it is a useful tool for measurements of human auditory perception.
