HEARBO robot can tell beeps, notes, and spoken word (w/ Video)
(Phys.org)—Research seeking to improve the features and functions of robots has made impressive gains with prototypes of robots that can help out in settings that range from assistive living, to hospital care, to inventory-taking retail stores. One area of robot technology receiving special attention at Honda is "robot audition." How effectively can scientists fashion robots that can hear? And, by hearing, how can hearing be ramped up to include speech recognition, even with noise interference? HEARBO, which stands for (HEAR-ing roBOt) is a robot that has been developed at Japan's Honda Research Institute–(HRI-JP), and its creators want HEARBO to stand out as an above-average example of how robots can understand sound. Their line of research is called Computational Auditory Scene Analysis.