Lightweight Multi-direction-of-arrival Estimation on a Mobile Robotic Platform

Knowledge of how many users are there in the environment, and where they are located is essential for natural and efficient Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). However, carry- ing out the estimation of multiple Directions-of-Arrival (multi- DOA) on a mobile robotic platform involves a greater challenge as the mobility of the service robot needs to be considered when proposing a solution. This needs to strike a balance with the performance of the DOA estimation, specifically the amount of users the system can detect, which is usually limited by the amount of microphones used. In this paper, a lightweight hardware system (based on a 3-microphone triangular system) is used, and a fast multi-DOA estimator is proposed that is able to estimate more users than the number of microphones employed. Index Terms—direction of arrival, service robots, triangular array, lightweight, robust

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