A group of engineers developed a robot they called acoustic swarm. This swarm of intriguing little robots can move around a space and control the separation of sound from multiple conversations in the room. Essentially, these swarms allow you to mute other people’s conversations and focus on your own.
Nowadays, we see similar technology used in headphones. This technology is based on filtering out background noise for a single person. But this acoustic swarm focuses on creating a cone of sound around different groups, allowing it to control where sound from multiple groups and conversations goes.
The acoustic swarm can deploy itself. All the speaker has to do is arrange the seven microphones used by the robots to create a partition within the room that acts as a “speech zone.” Robots then use this area to track and identify sounds, even while in motion. One of the biggest goals behind the design is to allow you to silence noisy areas (like annoying human voices in the background) when you need it for important conversations, video conferences and other things.
The researchers tested the robot swarm in places like offices and kitchens with three to five people talking, and the system had no prior knowledge of locations or sounds. Despite this, the device was able to detect 90 percent of sounds within 5 meters of each other. On average, the system takes 1.82 seconds to process three seconds of audio; This makes it a bit cumbersome for video conferences.
In the future, researchers want to be able to apply these silencing and separation techniques to the entire room in the physical space, in real time, using noise-cancelling headphones and microphones.
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