Abstract
With the current technological transformation in the automotive industry, autonomous vehicles are getting closer to the Society of Automative Engineers (SAE) automation level 5. This level corresponds to the full vehicle automation, where the driving system autonomously monitors and navigates the environment. With SAE-level 5, the concept of a Shared Autonomous Vehicle (SAV) will soon become a reality and mainstream. The main purpose of an SAV is to allow unrelated passengers to share an autonomous vehicle without a driver/moderator inside the shared space. However, to ensure their safety and well-being until they reach their final destination, active monitoring of all passengers is required. In this context, this article presents a microphone-based sensor system that is able to localize sound events inside an SAV. The solution is composed of a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) microphone array with a circular geometry connected to an embedded processing platform that resorts to Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology to successfully process in the hardware the sound localization algorithms.
Highlights
In the near future, autonomous vehicles will be sufficiently reliable, affordable, and widespread on our public roads, replacing many current human driving tasks [1]
The communication between both systems is achieved via the Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) protocol through the Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) bus and by resorting to the available Direct Memory Access (DMA) controller, and the communication with the microphone array PCB is done through the FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) interface
In order to test and evaluate the speaker localization and identification prototype, we have used the following experimental setup: (1) the sensor system prototype (Figure 8a); (2) an audio sound source; and (3) a laptop computer with a Robot Operating System (ROS) interface that subscribes to the ROS topics
Summary
Autonomous vehicles will be sufficiently reliable, affordable, and widespread on our public roads, replacing many current human driving tasks [1]. Current audio-only sensor systems use microphone arrays to localize different sound sources in a wide range of applications, for example, robot and human–robot interactions [19,20], drones direction calculation [21], audio recording for multi-channel reproduction [22], and multi-speaker voice and speech recognition [23]. In such solutions, the accuracy and detection performance is affected by the array geometry, where linear arrays are only able to localize sound sources in a 2D range [24], and circular [19,22,25], spherical [20,26], or other geometries [27,28] allow the system to localize in a. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the sensor system architecture; Sections 3 and 4 detail, respectively, the design and implementation steps to develop the sensor system (these sections are further divided in the microphone array and the processing platform); Section 5 presents the system evaluation, while Section 6 concludes this paper with a summary of our findings; Section 7 discusses some open issues regarding this research topic, pointing out some future work directions
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