EARS (Embodied Audio for Robot Systems) is an FP7 Robotics project with the participation of Prof. Boaz Rafaely from Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Robotics is one of the most hotly contested niche in the Euro Research Arena and thankfully the EARS consortium received a score of 14.5 (out of a possible total of 15) on its application and hence was funded.
Why EARS? Truly humanoid robots must be able to fully extract the rich auditory information from their environment and to use voice communication as much as humans do. While vision-based robotics is fairly well developed, robot audition lags behind with some of the reasons being background noise, interference and reverberation when captured by the robot’s microphones. Dealing with these challenges was the driving force behind the establishment of the EARS consortium, which includes five academic research groups and Aldebaran Robotics, one of Europe’s leading robot manufacturers
EARS consortium members on BGU campus:
