Distributed Acoustic Localization Array Deployed Using a Soft Everting Vine Robot
2026-07-22 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a soft robot shaped like a growing vine that can find people in disaster zones by listening to sounds around it. They placed tiny microphones along the robot's body and created a method to figure out where sounds are coming from, both far away and nearby. They tested different microphone placements and robot shapes to see how accurately the robot can locate a sound under various conditions. Their results show that even with just a few microphones exposed as the robot grows, it can quickly and accurately find the source of a sound. This suggests soft robots could be useful for locating trapped victims in complicated environments.
soft robotexteroceptiondistributed acoustic sensingsteered response powerdirection-of-arrival estimationsource localizationsignal-to-noise ratiovine robotshape-morphingmicrophone array
Authors
Sebastian Lorca Godoy, Ciera McFarland, Michael Val, Antonio Alvarez Valdivia, Nathaniel Hanson, Margaret McGuinness
Abstract
Soft robot exteroception is increasingly being explored for a variety of field applications. In this work, we present a sound-based system for localizing disaster victims in confined and unstructured environments, based on a distributed acoustic sensing architecture embedded along the body of a soft everting vine robot. We propose a dynamic Steered Response Power with Phase Transform framework that supports both far-field direction-of-arrival estimation and near-field three-dimensional source localization as the robot approaches the sound source. To better understand the design and control space related to localizing sound using a soft, shape-morphing robot body, we conduct experiments measuring the accuracy of these methods for a five-microphone array attached to the robot body using three placements relative to the outer membrane of the robot (inside the pressurized body, inside the inner tail, and outside the outer wall) and in four robot configurations (linear, double linear, circular, and sinusoidal). We measure the change in accuracy as the signal-to-noise ratio, the direction of approach, and the distance of the sound source from the center of the array change. Finally, we demonstrate a vine robot growing into an arbitrary shape while carrying microphones along its outer wall, and show that a sound source located with the array's near field can be localized with high accuracy after only three microphones have everted from the robot body. These results highlight the potential of distributed acoustic sensing for reliable victim localization using soft growing robots.