Two papers, one by Mikio Nakano (principal researcher) / Kotaro Funakoshi (researcher) and another by Kazuhiro Nakadai  (principal researcher) / Keisuke Nakamura  (researcher), are awarded the IROS 2011 Best Paper finalist (6 among 790 presented papers out of 2459 submitted papers) at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System 2011 (IROS2011).

The paper, Autonomous Acquisition of Multimodal Information for Online Object Concept Formation by Robots, pursues to understand “meaning of words” for the voice interface project. This study demonstrates online learning of object concept by autonomously acquiring auditory, visual, and haptic information. We expect robots in future manipulate variety of objects. This technology will expand a field of application for robots by enabling their manipulations without registration of objects beforehand.

The paper, SLAM-based Online Calibration of Asynchronous Microphone Array for Robot Audition, addresses microphone array processing for the computational scene  understanding project. Although  microphone array processing is effective to localize and separate sound sources, conventional microphone array techniques require measurement of microphone locations and special recording devices. This study solves these problems and makes microphone array processing more applicable.

※  The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems is one of the largest premier annual conferences of robotics research. The IROS 2011 Best Paper Award is given to the most outstanding paper presented at the conference based on the quality of the contribution.