The Talking Robot: Distortion-Robust Acoustic Models for Robot-Robot Communication

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07072v1
• Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2026 07:06:41 GMT
• Title: The Talking Robot: Distortion-Robust Acoustic Models for Robot-Robot Communication
• Abstract summary: Artoo is a learned acoustic communication system for robots.<n>It replaces hand-designed signal processing with end-to-end co-trained neural networks.
• Score: 6.356219992638542
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: 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 that surpass the baseline under noise, achieving 8.3% CER at 0 dB SNR. The entire system requires only 2.1M parameters (8.4 MB) and runs in under 13 ms end-to-end on a CPU, making it suitable for deployment on resource-constrained robotic platforms.

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