Can a Robot Hear the Shape and Dimensions of a Room?
This addresses the challenge of room geometry estimation for applications like sound source localization, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods by adding robotic path planning.
The paper tackles the problem of estimating room geometry using only acoustic signals, proposing a robot with a sound source and sensors that follows a path planning strategy to collect data, achieving highly promising results in synthetic validation.
Knowing the geometry of a space is desirable for many applications, e.g. sound source localization, sound field reproduction or auralization. In circumstances where only acoustic signals can be obtained, estimating the geometry of a room is a challenging proposition. Existing methods have been proposed to reconstruct a room from the room impulse responses (RIRs). However, the sound source and microphones must be deployed in a feasible region of the room for it to work, which is impractical when the room is unknown. This work propose to employ a robot equipped with a sound source and four acoustic sensors, to follow a proposed path planning strategy to moves around the room to collect first image sources for room geometry estimation. The strategy can effectively drives the robot from a random initial location through the room so that the room geometry is guaranteed to be revealed. Effectiveness of the proposed approach is extensively validated in a synthetic environment, where the results obtained are highly promising.