The Talking Robot: Distortion-Robust Acoustic Models for Robot-Robot Communication
We present Artoo, a learned acoustic communication system for robots that replaces hand-designed signal processing with end-to-end co-trained neural networks. Our system pairs a lightweight text-to-speech (TTS) transmitter (1.18M parameters) with a conformer-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) receiver (938K parameters), jointly optimized through a differentiable channel. Unlike human speech, robot-to-robot communication is paralinguistics-free: the system need not preserve timbre, prosody, or naturalness, only maximize decoding accuracy under channel distortion. Through a three-phase co-training curriculum, the TTS transmitter learns to produce distortion-robust acoustic encodings t...
| Authors | Hanlong Li, Karishma Kamalahasan, Jiahui Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 7 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 March 2026 |
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