Experimental Setup

 

Before testing the controller, the microphone array needed to be securely mounted on robotic devices. One of the assumptions in this research project was the array would only have one degree of freedom in terms of its motion. We stipulated the array would be limited to movements only in the x-direction. Moreover, this project was financial constrained to a certain extent; therefore, we chose a robotic platform based on commercially bought Lego® Mindstorm® NXT robots. By altering the existing platform, we were able to securely mount the microphone array on two different robots, and taking the error analysis performed into consideration, we held the distance fixed between pairs of microphones. The picture below shows the final design of our robotic platform.

This research project was completed in parallel with a research project focusing on real-time data acquisition and processing. By combining these projects, the control of the robotic array and data processing successfully estimated an acoustic source location at a given frequency. This allowed us to continuously optimize the sources position even as the source moved during experimentation. The second picture shows the complete experimental setup involving the robotic array, speaker source, and data processing system.

 

Demonstration

This is a demonstration performed at the Undergraduate Research Symposium. The display was limited to the constraints of the symposium, so only a small aspect of the research experiment could be shown. Our testing area was limited to the portable cart as seen in the picture above. (Link to Video)

Washington University in St. Louis

Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering

Robotic Microphone Sensing: Optimizing Source Estimation and Algorithms for Adaptive Control

Chase LaFont - Undergraduate Research Summer/Fall ‘09