Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are working towards improving robotic perception by adding the sense of hearing.
Learn more about robotic perceptions:
"A lot of preliminary work in other fields indicated that sound could be useful, but it wasn't clear how useful it would be in robotics," said Lerrel Pinto, who recently earned his Ph.D. in robotics at CMU and will join the faculty of New York University this fall.
Hearing is very critical if implemented in robotic devices as it could help improve interactions.
"I think what was really exciting was that when it failed, it would fail on things you expect it to fail on," he said. For instance, a robot couldn't use sound to tell the difference between a red block or a green block. "But if it was a different object, such as a block versus a cup, it could figure that out."
“The results were so encouraging, he added, that it might prove useful to equip future robots with instrumented canes, enabling them to tap on objects they want to identify.”
Source: Science Daily
