Robotic Mic Swarm Helps Pull Voices Out Of Crowded Room Of Multiple Speakers

One of the persistent challenges in audio technology has been distinguishing individual voices in a room full of chatter. In virtual meeting settings, the moderator can simply hit the mute button to focus on a single speaker. When there’s multiple people making noise in the same room, though, there’s no easy way to isolate a desired voice from the rest. But what if we ‘mute’ out these other boisterous talkers with technology?

Enter the University of Washington’s research team, who have developed a groundbreaking method to address this very challenge. Their innovation? A smart speaker equipped with self-deploying microphones that can zone in on individual speech patterns and locations, thanks to some clever algorithms.

Continue reading “Robotic Mic Swarm Helps Pull Voices Out Of Crowded Room Of Multiple Speakers”

Swarm Robotics


Uber-geek [James McLurkin] was in Austin recently demoing his robot swarm. He’s on tour with EDA Tech Forum. [McLurkin] has multiple degrees from the MIT AI lab and worked at iRobot for a couple of years. Lately, he has been working on distributed robot computing: robot swarms.

[McLurkin] was an entertaining speaker and had an interesting view of robotics. He is optimistic that robot parts will become more modular, so it will be easier to build them, and more importantly, faster to design them.

Some quotes:

  • “There’s more sensors in a cockroach’s butt than any robot”
  • “12 engineer years to design, 45 minutes to build”
  • “If it can break your ankle, it’s a real [rc] car.”

Continue reading “Swarm Robotics”