Friday Lunch Seminar

November 27, 2020
12:15 〜 13:00
(On-line for CiNet members only)

Talk Title: “Human echolocation inspired by flexible ultrasonic sensing by bats”

by Miwa Sumiya, CiNet NICT, JSPS

Host PI: Hiroshi Ando

Abstract:
Echolocation is to emit sounds and listen to echoes from objects to localize the objects. Bats, dolphins, and some blind people use echolocation to recognize their respective environments. For example, echolocating bats use brief ultrasounds and flexibly change the acoustic features of their echolocation signals (e.g., frequency and duration) and strategies for signal emissions (e.g., emission rate and direction), depending on the situation and purpose. The goals of our study are to investigate human echolocation inspired by flexible ultrasonic sensing by bats and to propose effective acoustic sensing strategies for humans.
In this talk, I will explain our human experiments on shape and texture discrimination task and texture identification task based on bat-inspired ultrasonic sensing. The results suggest that not only designing acoustic features of signals but also adjusting emission strategies are important for effective human echolocation similar to echolocating bats.