Measuring Acoustics with Collaborative Multiple Agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel multi-agent approach where two robots collaboratively explore and measure room acoustics, significantly improving efficiency over traditional methods by actively moving and predicting environment characteristics.

Contribution

It presents the first formulation and solution for collaborative environment acoustics measurement using multiple autonomous agents.

Findings

Robots learn to explore environment acoustics effectively.

Collaborative policy improves measurement accuracy.

Multi-agent system reduces measurement time.

Abstract

As humans, we hear sound every second of our life. The sound we hear is often affected by the acoustics of the environment surrounding us. For example, a spacious hall leads to more reverberation. Room Impulse Responses (RIR) are commonly used to characterize environment acoustics as a function of the scene geometry, materials, and source/receiver locations. Traditionally, RIRs are measured by setting up a loudspeaker and microphone in the environment for all source/receiver locations, which is time-consuming and inefficient. We propose to let two robots measure the environment's acoustics by actively moving and emitting/receiving sweep signals. We also devise a collaborative multi-agent policy where these two robots are trained to explore the environment's acoustics while being rewarded for wide exploration and accurate prediction. We show that the robots learn to collaborate and move to explore environment acoustics while minimizing the prediction error. To the best of our knowledge, we present the very first problem formulation and solution to the task of collaborative environment acoustics measurements with multiple agents.