Acoustic sensing is rapidly emerging as a critical area of research, offering new possibilities for robust robotic perception, localization, and interaction in complex environments. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from various domains and disciplines to discuss the latest advancements, challenges, and future directions in acoustic sensing for robotics. Acoustic sensors, including microphones, sonar, and ultrasonic devices, provide unique advantages in scenarios where vision-based perception may be limited by adversarial lighting conditions, occlusions, or environmental complexity.
Acoustic sensors may endow robots with heightened situational awareness, allow them to reason about interactions with the environment and enable sound-based feedback mechanisms that can react to voice commands or environment noise. However, acoustic signals also present unique open challenges, such as susceptibility to noise, multi-path propagation effects, the need for real-time processing in dynamic environments, and extracting acoustic features or learning representations that are robust to context-dependent distortions. Addressing these challenges is crucial for unlocking the full potential of acoustic sensing in robotics.
