Development of an Ear Unit including Outer-Ear Structure for Human-mimetic Humanoid

Abstract

The recognition of the environment is significant for humanoids to realize advanced tasks. In this study, we develop an ear unit for human mimetic humanoids to realize human-like sound recognition of the surroundings. This ear unit is composed of outer ear structures, MEMS microphone boards and a FPGA sound processing board. We conduct two evaluation experiments of this ear unit. First one is a confirmation experiment of frequency response fluctuation by changing the pitch angle of the head and we acquired filters which depend on sound source direction by introducing outer ear structure. Second experiment is an estimation experiment of horizontal sound source direction based on Jeffress model[1] and we succeeded to estimate sound source direction in front.