Possibility of Head-Shape Simplification for an Acoustical Telepresence Robot: TeleHead

We built an acoustical telepresence robot named TeleHead. TeleHead has a user-like dummy head and is synchronized with the user’s head movement in real time. The user-like dummy head improves sound localization accuracy. However, making a user-like dummy head for each user is not realistic from the viewpoint of engineering. Therefore, we made several kinds of simplified dummy head and examined their influence on sound localization. The results show that, among the dummy heads tested, the user-like dummy head is the best one for sound localization experiments. When subjects used a simple rugby-ball-like dummy head, they could not localize sound at all. The results suggest that an accurate dummy head improves sound localization accuracy and point to the possibility of simplifying dummy heads for practical use in sound localization.