Design of a semi-spherical microphone array based sound localization system

This paper proposes a semi-spherical microphone array based sound localization system for a service robot. The hardware of the proposed system basically contains 12 capacitor microphones disposed in two layers on the semi-sphere of 19 cm diameter. It aims to estimate the degree relationship between the main speaker and the robot and provides the robot useful information for more effective human-robot interactions. The proposed system can determine the location of the voice according to energy information between the main speaker and robot not only in normal environment but also in blatant and/or reverberative spaces. The experimental results show that the proposed system has obtained satisfactory recognition efficiency, moreover, raised the robotic friendliness and adaptability.