Speaker

Kazuhiro Nakadai

Title

Robot Audition in the Wild: Toward an Inclusive Society

Abstract

Robot Audition is a concept originally proposed by Nakadai and colleagues to enable robots to perceive and understand complex acoustic scenes in real-world environments where noise, reverberation, and multiple sound sources coexist. In this invited talk, I revisit the development of robot audition from the perspective of “in the wild” sensing, highlighting how auditory and multimodal perception must evolve when robots operate beyond controlled laboratory settings. The talk begins by introducing the core technologies of robot audition, including sound source localization and separation, and by discussing the fundamental challenges that arise when these techniques are deployed in real environments. Building on this foundation, I present a series of research efforts that extend robot audition toward real-world applications, such as locating humans using sound in search-and-rescue scenarios, inferring environmental and surface properties from acoustic signals, and analyzing bird songs for ecological monitoring in outdoor environments. I also discuss how the same technical principles can be extended toward human-centered interaction, particularly sign-language-based human–robot interaction, where communication relies on non-verbal and multimodal signals rather than speech alone. Although these research topics address different application domains, they are unified by a common technical direction: expanding the signals, agents, and environments that intelligent systems are designed to perceive and reason about. By framing robot audition as a foundation for multimodal perception and interaction in the wild, this talk presents a technical pathway through which such expansions can lead toward the realization of an inclusive society, enabling intelligent systems to engage not only with diverse humans, but also with challenging environments and even non-human entities.

Bio

TBD

Language

English (Offline)