Audio ray tracing for position estimation of entities in blind regions

This paper presents a framework for making a mobile robot aware of an entity in the blind region of its laser range finders when that entity emits sound. First in a mapping stage, a 3D description of the environment that contains information about acoustic reflection is created. Then during operation, the robot combines estimated directions of arrival of sound with this 3D description to detect entities that are not visible by line of sight sensors but could be heard because of sound reflections. Using this approach, it is possible to restrict the hypothesis about the position of a sound emitting entity in the blind region to a small set of candidate depth values.