Belief-Driven Control Policy of a Drone with Microphones for Multiple Sound Source Search

This paper proposes a belief-driven control policy of a drone with microphones for multiple sound source search. As the sound source localization by drones is uncertain because of the observation significantly distorted by noise such as rotor noise, the belief on the estimated targets may consist of multiple peaks that are spread over the bounded search area. The proposed control policy is formulated with a robust cost function so that the function encodes the search mission properly. A peak management mechanism is additionally introduced to keep tracking all targets by masking sufficiently observed and well estimated targets whose peaks normally become steep and high. The proposed control policy was evaluated by numerical simulations, and experiments, and those results have validated the efficacy of the proposed control policy.