Project Overview

This research was conducted over the Summer and Fall 2009 semesters at Washington University by Raphael Schwartz and Zachary Knudson to fulfill the requirements of ESE 497 Undergraduate Research. The project was overseen by Dr. Arye Nehorai, Phani Chavali, Patricio S. La Rosa and Ed Richter of the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. It was done in conjunction with Chase LaFont's project, “Robotic Microphone Sensing: Design of A Robotic Platform and Algorithms for Adaptive Control of Sensing Parameters”

In Fall 2009 our work was presented at Washington University's Undergraduate Research Symposium with the following abstract:

 

Robotic Microphone Sensing: Data Processing Architectures for Real-Time Acoustic Source Position Estimation              

In our previous undergraduate research project on "Acoustic Source Location Using Cross-correlation Algorithms" we found that the performance of the 2D position estimation algorithms using two pairs of microphones depends on array variables such as the distances between the individual and pairs of microphones, and also the sampling frequency. Therefore, we propose to build a robotic microphone array with autonomous control of the array geometry and sampling rate for improving the localization performance of an acoustic source in 2D space. In particular, in this project we focus on developing data processing architectures for estimating in real-time the 2D locations of an acoustic source. We implemented our algorithms in Labview combined with Matlab and developed a graphical user interface that allows for easy interaction with the experimental setup. Our system allows for tracking a fixed and moving wideband acoustic source.