Patent ID: 7227960

Claim:
A method of controlling a robot including voice capturing means having directivity based on frequency components of vocal cord pulses, the method comprising the steps of: aligning an attention direction of the robot with a directivity direction of a microphone array including a plurality of microphones; generating input signals severally for the microphones by capturing an acoustic signal from a sound source; passing each input signal through an adaptive filter for generating an excitation signal for each input signal, wherein each adaptive filter generates an inverse filter that models a vocal tract envelope and generates an excitation signal that models vocal cord pulses, wherein the excitation signal contains more high-frequency components in comparison to the corresponding input signal captured at the microphone; estimating a direction of the sound source from a plurality of excitation signals based on frequency components of vocal cord pulses by: calculating a cross-correlation function among the plurality of excitation signals to produce a sharp peak based on frequency components of the vocal cord pulses, and finding a peak value of the cross-correlation function along an axis of duration, wherein the location of the peak identifies the direction corresponding to the vocal cord pulses, controlling at least any one of a visual line and a posture of the robot based on said direction to allow the attention direction of the robot to coincide with the direction of the sound source; and aligning the directivity direction of the microphone array with the attention direction such that the robot is aligned in a direction of the sound source corresponding to the frequency components of vocal cord pulses.