Real-Time Acoustic Touch Localization in Human-Robot Interaction based on Steered Response Power

The sense of touch plays an important role in Human-Robot Interaction, allowing a natural form of communication with humans and improving the rest of the robot’s senses. This is even more important in the subject of social robotics, where robots must interact with people and adhere to social conventions while doing so. Touch interfaces can be implemented as part of a robotic platform serving multiple purposes. Some examples include the use of tactile commands to control the movement of a robot, or attempting to endow a robot with the ability to understand human emotional states. This work proposes a system to localize a contact performed on the rigid, non-planar shell of a service robot in real-time, based on set of spatially separated piezo transducers attached to the shell of the robot and the Steered Response Power sound source localization algorithm. Results show the potential capability of the system to correctly detect and localize human touches.