| The first part of this thesis proposes an application of the microphone-array-based sound localization technique, known as SRP-PRAT, for navigating an acoustic mobile robot, called Trilobot. Experiments show that the average localization error of Trilobot is 7 cm close to the array and 30 cm far away from the array.; The second part of the thesis introduces a new sound localization technique for mobile robots, known as Sound Localization with Side Information or simply SLSI. The advantage of the proposed technique over SRP-PRAT is that it uses prior knowledge of the words spoken by the robot. SLSI is also tested on Trilobot. The experiments show that SLSI outperforms SRP-PHAT. The reduction of the sound localization anomalies, that SLSI is able to achieve, is in the order of 20% and 25% for SNRs bigger than 2dB using a mechanical speaker and 10% at SNR equal to 10dB using Trilobot. |
