Map related acoustic filtering by a mobile robot

A robot comprising:

• a body and one or more physically moveable components;
• a plurality of microphones;
• one or more processors;
• and
• one or more storage devices storing instructions that are operable, when executed by the one or more processors, to cause the robot to perform operations comprising:
• determining a current location of the robot in an environment of the robot;
• determining that the current location is associated with one or more location-specific audio processing techniques;
• obtaining, by the plurality of microphones, respective audio signals of sound waves propagating in the environment of the robot;
• and
• processing the audio signals according to the one or more location-specific audio processing techniques.

A robot comprising:

• a body and one or more physically moveable components;
• a plurality of microphones;
• one or more processors;
• and
• one or more storage devices storing instructions that are operable, when executed by the one or more processors, to cause the robot to perform operations comprising:
• receiving, by the robot, one or more audio signals at a particular location in an environment of the robot;
• selecting, based on the particular location of the robot, a plurality of precomputed acoustic transfer functions from a database of acoustic transfer functions that associates each acoustic transfer function with a respective location in the environment of the robot;
• computing a single composite acoustic transfer function from the plurality of selected acoustic transfer functions;
• and
• processing the received one or more audio signals using the composite acoustic transfer function.

A system comprising:

• one or more computers and one or more storage devices storing instructions that are operable, when executed by the one or more computers, to cause the one or more computers to perform operations comprising:
• receiving data representing a plurality of transfer functions that each represents how a sound wave was transformed by the environment of a robot while the sound wave propagated from a respective sound origin in the environment of the robot to a respective sound destination in the environment of the robot;
• selecting a plurality of sound origins associated with one of the plurality of transfer functions;
• computing a plurality of candidate locations in the environment of the robot;
• evaluating each candidate location of the plurality of candidate locations, including:
• computing a respective origin score for each selected sound origin of the plurality of selected sound origins, each respective score representing a decrease in sound quality of a sound wave propagating from the selected sound origin to the candidate location according to a particular transfer function having the candidate location as a sound destination;
• and
• computing an aggregate score for the candidate location based on the origin scores computed between the selected sound origins and the candidate location;
• determining a candidate location of the plurality of candidate locations having a best aggregate score;
• and
• providing, to the robot, data that causes the robot to navigate within the environment of the robot to the candidate location having the best aggregate score.