Acoustic Determination of Contact on the Exterior Surface of the Robot

Robot control systems use feedback to counter unknown external forces (disturbance). However, when the disturbance is big and sudden, feedback may not be fast enough to fix the motion, so robots moving in a dynamic environment full of people must use some kind of sensors to feel such impacts on time. One approach is to use tactile sensors. However, one needs many sensors to accurately determine the position of the impact, which makes the system complex and expensive. I propose a system which uses a microphone array to determine the impact position. This system can use only a few number of microphones to determine the position, which makes the system cheap and simple.