Jean-Samuel Lauzon

François Grondin, Dominic Létourneau, Cédric Godin et al.

Artificial audition aims at providing hearing capabilities to machines, computers and robots. Existing frameworks in robot audition offer interesting sound source localization, tracking and separation performance, although involve a significant amount of computations that limit their use on robots with embedded computing capabilities. This paper presents ODAS, the Open embeddeD Audition System framework, which includes strategies to reduce the computational load and perform robot audition tasks on low-cost embedded computing systems. It presents key features of ODAS, along with cases illustrating its uses in different robots and artificial audition applications.

François Grondin, Jean-Samuel Lauzon, Simon Michaud et al.

This paper introduces BIRD, the Big Impulse Response Dataset. This open dataset consists of 100,000 multichannel room impulse responses (RIRs) generated from simulations using the Image Method, making it the largest multichannel open dataset currently available. These RIRs can be used toperform efficient online data augmentation for scenarios that involve two microphones and multiple sound sources. The paper also introduces use cases to illustrate how BIRD can perform data augmentation with existing speech corpora.

Jonathan Vincent, Mathieu Labbé, Jean-Samuel Lauzon et al.

In dynamic environments, performance of visual SLAM techniques can be impaired by visual features taken from moving objects. One solution is to identify those objects so that their visual features can be removed for localization and mapping. This paper presents a simple and fast pipeline that uses deep neural networks, extended Kalman filters and visual SLAM to improve both localization and mapping in dynamic environments (around 14 fps on a GTX 1080). Results on the dynamic sequences from the TUM dataset using RTAB-Map as visual SLAM suggest that the approach achieves similar localization performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods, while also providing the position of the tracked dynamic objects, a 3D map free of those dynamic objects, better loop closure detection with the whole pipeline able to run on a robot moving at moderate speed.

Simon Michaud, Samuel Faucher, François Grondin et al.

A microphone array can provide a mobile robot with the capability of localizing, tracking and separating distant sound sources in 2D, i.e., estimating their relative elevation and azimuth. To combine acoustic data with visual information in real world settings, spatial correlation must be established. The approach explored in this paper consists of having two robots, each equipped with a microphone array, localizing themselves in a shared reference map using SLAM. Based on their locations, data from the microphone arrays are used to triangulate in 3D the location of a sound source in relation to the same map. This strategy results in a novel cooperative sound mapping approach using mobile microphone arrays. Trials are conducted using two mobile robots localizing a static or a moving sound source to examine in which conditions this is possible. Results suggest that errors under 0.3 m are observed when the relative angle between the two robots are above 30 degrees for a static sound source, while errors under 0.3 m for angles between 40 degrees and 140 degrees are observed with a moving sound source.