Robots’ Asimo ‘proved to be a referee

Honda Human robots’ Asimo ‘has learned a new trick: He can be equipped with a sophisticated hearing the exclamations of three people at a time. This is possible thanks to an order of eight microphones and a new Japanese scientists developed software.
Initially Asimo it simply acts as an arbitrator playing rock paper scissors. The ‘HARK’ referred to in the future software will also be able to cope with complex sentences, reports the trade magazine New Scientist. Eight microphones on the face and body of the robot provide input for HARK. The software analyzes the images to determine where a voice comes and separates them from other noise sources and the other speakers. Then HARK examine whether the individual votes really well insulated, before the data to a speech recognition software forwarded. This is the HARK system on the possibilities of the human hearing, said the researchers. “There can be several things simultaneously and not just listen to a single source of noise in focus,” says co-HARK Hiroshi Okuno of the Kyoto University. The technology is still in its infancy. Currently, Asimo with the new hearing followed by three players at the same time their choice for a rock-scissors-paper game callout and reaches HARK according to the developers 70 to 80 percent accuracy. In the more complex task, while the orders of three people in a restaurant to understand the system have only 30 to 40 percent of the identified said. The work of the researcher was on the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.