The Ears

What you can see in the picture above is the detail of the Babybot external ear. It's a sort of conic hand made plastic lobe that covers a microphone. With two ears and some directional tuning it is possible to localize sound in space (under certain hypotheses).

We investigated the link between sound and vision and especially what the contribution of vision is in the acquisition of a multi-modal map (visuo-acoustic) of the environment.

We modeled the process of sound localization by computing the difference in phase and intensity of the signals impinging on the two microphones. The directional tuning given by the external ears maximizes the difference of these two signals allowing better localization abilities.